


Chasing Stars

by karakael



Category: GaoGaiGar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-01-05 22:39:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 40,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12198825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karakael/pseuds/karakael
Summary: Five years ago the Trinary Solar System Alliance defeated the Primevals and saved the galaxy. But to Soldato J-002 the victory rings hollow. Forced to give up his wings by royal order, the once-proud warrior lives in self-imposed exile with the last remnant of his days of glory, his ship AI Tomoro. But when a damaged alien cyborg is teleported into his life, J must question if he really wants to live out the rest of his days in isolation...or if he is just running away from his dreams.





	1. The Girl from Far Away

“My son. Where is he?”

When Cain came to Earth, it was with one goal, and one goal only. He had come in the trappings of a diplomat, hiding his true position as the King of the Trinary Solar System. He had saved on of their strongest warriors, earning the humans’ trust, and shown them marvels, inciting their greed, all in service to his true goal. 

In the two years since Glaleon had delivered him to this planet he had been distracted and disappointed again and again. But now, finally, the Earth Science Establishment - who called themselves GGG - had a lead on his precious son, Latio. 

And yet they had requested he stay here, in his suit of rooms within their tower, rather than accompany them to find the boy. To say his patience was being tested was an understatement.

He repeated himself. "Where is he?"

The beaked scientist who stood before him sighed. “Why don’t you sit down, friend?”

Cain did nothing of the sort, choosing instead to tower over the man.

“I sensed him today. Latio could be out there - in danger! After all this time, if he…”

The scientist - Liger - waved a hand. “No, no. Your boy is fine. We know that for certain now. The problem is...well...He might be _too_ fine.”

“What could you possibly mean?!” The royal demanded.

Liger sat back on his hover board, casually ignoring Cain’s bravado. “You said your son would only display his powers if he was in danger, right?”

“Yes. Which is why - “

“And that he’d be totally human otherwise.”

“Yes. Mimic genes allow the elites to - “

“Right. So we haven’t been able to find him for two years because he’s never been in danger. He’s never had any need to use his powers, or remember his heritage. In fact, we’re not sure if he’s ever tapped into his Trinary System genes.” Liger searched Cain’s face, seeing a blank expression with no apparent understanding of the problem.

“That power you sensed earlier? That was because of us. Not because we hurt him!” The scientist was quick to point out, as Cain began to glow. “But because...well...We told him he needed to go with you.”

The glow faded, and Cain said, “I don’t understand.”

Liger fidgeted with his bootstraps, avoiding the other man’s eyes. “Mamoru - that’s his human name - has lived here for eight years as a normal human boy. He goes to school, plays games with friends, does his homework...He didn’t even know he was adopted until we showed up asking questions.” Liger paused, then pushed on with the ugly truth, “He reacted violently when he thought he would be forced to leave his family. He’s refusing to leave Earth.”

Cain stared. “...family? But _I_ am his family.”

“Biological, yes. But he doesn’t know you. To him, the family that is important is the one who raised him for ten years.”

The diplomat slumped backwards into a chair, head buried in his hands as what Liger said sunk in. The scientist tutted and flew over to pat him reassuringly on the back. 

“I sent him away to protect him from the war.” Cain whispered, deep voice cracking. “I never thought I’d lose him even if we won.”

Liger forced a smile, “Hey, it's not so bad. He’s alive, he’s doing fine, and we finally found him. Three for three better than I got with my kid, right?”

\----------- 

The storm raged outside. Not that that was a surprise. There were always storms, even now, when the Red Planet was in its “winter" - if being cold enough that liquid water could reach the surface was ‘winter'. The temporary cooling resulting from being further from two of the three suns of the Trinary System only dampened the wind, doing nothing to calm the violent forces that raged no matter the season. Higher up, into the true clouds, storms raced by at hundreds of flights an hour, causing the sky to broil with a never-ending haze, while on the surface weaker storms pounded themselves out against the arid ground before finally dissipating back into mere noxious, unending winds.

It played hell on the ox-arrays, and made them next to useless for collecting the all-important oxygen. The only positive was that the wind would leave the compound’s energy arrays full for a few cycles, but it was barely worth the expensive repairs that resulted from keeping the 'mills deployed in such treacherous weather. 

Soldato J-002 - though he just went by J now - thought about all of that as he watched the storm through the view screens. This one had blown up faster than even Tomoro could have predicted, so there wasn’t much use in debating whether he should have collapsed the arrays or not. If anything was damaged, he’d fix it, just as with everything else on this sky-forsaken farm.

Behind him his armor hung, taking up the center of the main room of the primarily underground compound. The beam of clear white light that held it aloft made the armor glow green, and every time he glanced at it J was sorely tempted to hang his responsibilities and suit up once again. In his armor he could survive the storm. Hell, he had flown in far worse during the war. But they had taken his scarf when he's left the army, and now he was forever grounded. Watching the storm from the surface was really no different from watching it through the monitors. Neither could bring him what he truly wanted.

“J? I’ve just picked up a weird energy reading.”

The former soldier was jolted from his brooding by Tomoro’s high, clear voice. The two of them had been together since the war, when Tomoro had been the AI system behind J’s battleship. He’d followed J out of the service, and now acted as the computer system for the house and the ox farm.

“Weird how?” J asked, falling easily back into the role of commander.

“There was a flash of radiation the systems have never registered before, gone too fast for me to get a read on.”

“EM interference with your sensors?”

“I’d think that, 'cept there's something else there now. I wouldn't have noticed it without the radiation, but there's a life sign.”

Tomoro paused at the sudden clatter of activity from J.

“It’s really faint, though. If something is alive out there, it won’t last - J, where are you going?”

But the former Soldato was already out the door, helmet snug over his eyes, armor fitting just like it had all those years ago.

\------------------

A more sensible AI would have revolted were its master to do something as stupid as run into an acid storm. It would have been easy enough to simply direct J back to the compound and let whatever fool Tomoro had sensed die and then scavenge the body. But there was no dissuading J when he set his mind to something, and anyways Tomoro far preferred the type of adventures J discovered to the boring route work most of the other Tomoro series were now doing. Plus, J would have gone after the life sign with or without Tomoro’s help.

So the AI followed along as best it could, cutting through the electrical distortions whenever possible to make corrections to the map in J's helmet and to give updates on the signal. It was infuriating to be so powerless, though, as every spike in EM left Tomoro blind and worried for his friend.

J moved as fast as he could, skidding on shifting sands and fighting the hurricane force winds. Whenever he could he flared his crest and let the wind carry him forward far faster than he could manage himself. It was a parody of true flight, but it sped his steps faster than any Green could have managed. With Tomoro’s patchy help he was able to reach the marked gully within minutes, though calling the fractured ground created by the violent red planet volcanoes a 'gully' would be a bit ingenuous. But The Red Planet had been settled by Greens, and so their terminology stuck, despite no water having flowed on the planet's surface for millions of years. The whole landscape was marred by such shallow ravines, some exposed lava tunnels, others created by the blasting sands or lava flows, the deepest created by the flexing of the planet itself. Any sensible builder would utilize the feature of the planet in construction, and the few surface dwellings were generally built into the sides of these gullies, while the wind and oxygen farms stuck above the surface on the wind-scoured plateaus. 

The closer one traveled towards the distant volcanoes, the more the gullies turned into a massive maze, nigh impossible to traverse and liable to scatter any homing beacon into a million conflicting signals. If the life sign had been any further away J would have never been able to track it and Tomoro would have never been able to sense it in the first place.

Of course, a Soldato could fly over the gullies with little thought, mapping the maze from the air and only dipping into the canyons at the last moment, which was exactly what J did, following Tomoro’s directions and gliding over the gullies as best he could, timing his leaps with tail-winds and descending into their relative shelter only when the wind turned against him.

Still, the life-sign faded as he neared it, falling off Tomoro’s radar completely and leaving him to navigate by memory alone. No being other than a heavily modified Red could survive on the surface, and even J struggled against the acid rain that ate away at his under-suit. Whoever this person was, they weren’t long for the world, and he didn’t even consider that they might pose any kind of threat to him.

The life-sign flickered as he clambered down into its canyon, a medium sized one that was about double his height at the lowest. Deep shadows made it difficult to see, and he stumbled once on some kind of metal debris before finally making it to the figure slumped in the sands. 

What he saw spurred him to fast action. 

“Tomoro, I’m going off-line" was his only warning before he disappeared from the com-sensor, sending the AI into a panic before he realized what his master had done.

The life-sign flickered again as J jerked off his helmet. The figure’s face, barely above the sand, was red even in the orange light of the Red Planet. Its breath was short, interspersed with rasping gasps that faded even as J ran forward. He stumbled once again before finally reaching it and shoving his helmet over the figure’s face.

Oxygen flooded the creature’s system, and it spasmed on the ground, coughing violently before fading back into silence. J breathed a sigh of relief, close enough now to sense the thing’s heart-beat evening out, even as its consciousness faded and it stilled on the ground.

Despite the initial danger being over, J did not hesitate to pull the body from the sand, shocked to find it both light and somehow burning with more heat than the air around it. Its garments were frayed and seemed to be melting from its body, and jagged mechanical components scratched his arms as he picked it up. Around it other machine parts were quickly being covered with sand, but J ignored them in favor of returning to the compound as fast as possible. If they needed anything from the gully, they could always return after the storm.

The journey back was worse than the journey out. Even the light weight of the creature weighed him down, slowing him in head-winds and preventing him from gliding in tailwinds. Now he had to climb the gullies one armed while carrying a dead weight, trying to ignore the weak heart-beat and ugly sizzling smell the acid rain produced when it hit the creature’s exposed flesh. And he did it blind, working on homing instinct rather than directions from Tomoro. His instructors at the academy would have called him mad, and drummed into him the replacibility of a single soldier or civilian. But he was a civilian, now, and he pressed on, ignoring the fatigue and the sting of the rain, the heat of his burden giving him the extra energy to finish the final mile to the compound.

At the time he barely noticed it, but the trip back to the compound was the first time in three years that he called on the power of his J-Jewel. Step by persistent step, it bled energy into his cybernetic system even as the world around him fought to push him back.

It was with relief that he reached the door, which Tomoro opened instantly, without any of their normal decontamination protocols, for which J was grateful. Nevermind the sand that blasted through the air-locks, nevermind the wind that tore hangings from the walls and scraped scratches into sensitive monitors. He stumbled into a fully breathable atmosphere and gasped a sigh of relief at the hiss of the door behind him. But he didn’t rest long, forcing his flagging system forward and on to the medical bay which Tomoro had already awoken from its long slumber. The creature was deposited onto the operating table and J was finally able to relax and breath.

Within the full oxygen of the compound the creature’s breathing and heartbeat strengthened, though there was no way to judge what their normal level was, and J slumped into the nearest chair, breathing hard but humming with the adrenaline of the first real challenge he’d had in years. 

Around him the room came to life, scanners coming online and tinting the room with the glow of J-Jewel energy. There were no straps on the operating table, but bans of force expanded to keep the patient steady as Tomoro used the scanners to look at the creature from the inside out.

When the preliminary scan was complete the AI swore.

“J, this is a mess. She’s almost gone.”

“...she?” J sat up, surprised at the quick gendering from the AI. It was rare that a Red Planeter expressed extremes of one gender or another, certainly not to the extent that an AI could decide without asking.

“Look at her, J. She’s built like a bloody Green Priest!”

Now that his breathing had calmed, J did exactly that, standing on shaking legs and walking to look down at the table. He immediately saw what Tomoro meant, as well as a host of other inexplicable features.

The creature he had brought in was small, but he had already known that. On a bay designed for a Soldato’s frame, it was tiny. The uniform that he had felt melting in the heat was mostly gone now, leaving bare pinkish flesh exposed, while Tomoro make quick work of the rest of the black material. Even now the fabric stank of chemicals, of plastic and latex and the burn of acid. It was lucky there was something beneath the fabric, and that the black material was not the creature’s actual flesh, for if it had been most of its - her - internals would have been exposed to the worst of the rain. As it was, acid had splashed against flesh, leaving red welts that crisscrossed old scars and punctures. 

But the exposed mechanical components were more worrying, with flexible tubing warped or broken, leaking a viscous black liquid that surely had some important purpose. Tomoro was far more hesitant to touch this part of the creature’s form, uncertain of what the components were intended to do. The tubes were attached to the creature’s face and arms, legs and feet, connecting all to both the uniform and other internals.

Over its eyes was a shattered visor. Tubes in the cheek connected to a device bolted over where a Green would have ears. Its flesh was a mish-mash of organics and some polymer, and bits of its flesh were burnt away to reveal muscle fused with machines, all connected by primitive screws and fraying wires rather than more sensible engineered tendons. Everything about the creature was wrong, in form and function.

But looking beyond the strange costume and perplexing mechanics, and it was obvious what Tomoro meant. Beneath it all, the creature looked like a woman, with breasts and no obvious external genitalia. Only the Green Planet elite retained such dimorphism with their genders, and even then the creature was on the extreme end of the spectrum.

“It's like she’s a parody of the Elites.” J whispered, and Tomoro hummed in agreement. 

“Not just on the outside. Look at her internals - only 30% mechanics, but I don’t recognize the gene sequence. Its nothing like any of the Reds I have on file. Not even the Armas displayed this much deviation from the norm. And the code from some parts of her body are different than others, as if someone inserted completely different sequences into her code, but never finished the gene-mod. It's like...like an amateur tried to make a Soldato. The gene-mod works with the mechanics, but it's incomplete and half the stuff seems incompatible. But that’s not the worst of it!”

J pulled his eyes from the brutal remains of the woman’s right arm, which had sustained the most damage of the whole form, burnt flesh and snapped mechanics going all the way down to the bone, the hand so tightly curled that fingers were broken and wires fuzed.

“What could be worse?”

“They didn’t include a power-regulator. Every one of her systems out-puts enough heat to cause a Green to explode. And she’s been holding it inside the whole time.”


	2. Against the Odds

Cain paced, back and forth, forth and back, within the suit of rooms GGG had given him for his stay in Japan. Initially he had been confused as to why the planetary government had kept him largely restricted to this tiny island, but he quickly realized that the Earth government was so fractured that many countries did not have the resources to assist his search, or to utilize the technology he offered. As of yet, he had only made sustained visits to China and the United States, and the Orbital Space Station that was in the middle of construction. The backwardness of the Earthlings amazed him, but luck was on his side, as his son lived in the same country he had first visited.

Certainly the Japanese spared no expense upon him, finding him quarters that surpassed in size even the most senior of Green diplomats back in the Trinary system. Of course there was little space left on the Green planet while humans had barely utilized a third of their planet with plenty of space to expand, but the luxury could not be denied. If only his son was here to share in it.

Instead…

“Why have you been assigned to me?”

Dr. Liger flipped over his hoverboard, coming to rest near Cain’s head. “Which reason do you want? The government’s, or the personal?”

Cain’s eyes narrowed.

“Smart guy like you should be able to figure it out.”

“You are one of the premier scientists of this world. Your leaders wish you to learn as much as possible from me.”

“Ah, right you are!”

“I would have thought you would have better luck reviewing the information I have given to your science establishments, rather than hanging about and pestering me.”

“Eh, let the intern’s do the grunt work. There’s a second reason I’m here.”

Cain batted the hoverboard away. “And that is?”

“They figure you’re pissed about your son. But you’re less likely to take it out on the guy with the dead daughter.”

Cain blinked, then swore. The logic was sound. Liger so casually mentioned his missing child, but of all the other officials he was the one that could understand Cain’s loss best. The idea that the man would use that to keep Cain from reacting poorly was repugnant, but clever in the way only humans could be. 

“What would your daughter think of your using her death in such away?”

Liger’s smiling face clouded for an instant. “I...I don’t know. I never got the chance to know her well.”

Even knowing that this was exactly the reason Liger had been assigned to him, Cain’s heart softened. “That makes two of us, then.”

\-------

“J, this isn’t looking good.”

Thirty minutes of scans, and Tomoro had simply found more and more problems. On the positive side, most of them seemed to stem from the woman’s atrocious design. She had survived the heat and oxygen deprivation with no apparent loss of brain matter or major damage to her internals. On the negative, her design was slowly killing her, and something traumatic had happened before the atmosphere had got to her that had made every one of her problems worse.

“There was some kind of power-surge that ripped through her system. I’m still picking up the energy waves, and they’re interfering with my targeted scans…”

“Do you have a source on the energy? Was it the same thing you originally registered?”

“It’s certainly similar, but I’m not sure...wait a second, does she have something in her hand?”

J blinked and looked closer at the woman’s crushed right arm. It did appear as if her hand had clenched around something, though whatever it was was now hidden by the melted metal and burnt flesh.

“...I don’t know.” A scalpel dropped on the table near J, and he glanced up to find Tomoro looking through one of the monitors.

“Try to get the hand open.” J glanced at the far more precise array that Tomoro controlled remotely, and the AI quickely added. “The energy is strong enough that it might fry me.”

“That bad?”

The eye shape that Tomoro prefered bobbed in the monitor, a computer’s version of a nod.

“I’ll direct you from here.”

The laser scalpel cut away the wires and plasticized veins easy enough, but had no luck with the titanium alloy that wrapped around the woman’s joints and knuckles. Another man might have felt guilt at the solution, but J set aside the scalpel with a minimum hesitation and physically forced the hand open, ignoring the snap of titanium and the shock as he touched whatever she held. Tomoro had been right to be worried; the energy surge as he curled back her fingers was enough to dim the lights around the room.

The AI swooped in, then swore, and even J had to sit back, stunned.

In the center of the woman’s palm, almost fused into the flesh and metal, was a fully formed G-Stone.

\----------- 

G-Stones were some of the most highly coveted pieces of technology in the entire Trinary System. The Green Planet Elites kept them under lock and key, portioning out the incredibly powerful crystals only to the most worthy causes. Whole star-ships could be powered by a single massive stone, while the royals used their stones to amplify their psychic powers to an unbelievable level.

Even during the War against the Primevals the Red Planeters had been forced to depend upon their own cloned version of the stones. The J-Jewels were just as strong as a G-Stone but more difficult to use, requiring a high level of machine integration that resulted in large portions of the Red planet having to be completely retrofitted to uses the power-source. And now the priests railed against using the technology too heavily since the war was over. Most of the Soldatos had given up their Jewels along with their wings, returning to their original forms when their planet no longer needed them, and protecting themselves from the ire of the priests. Their Jewels went to power small star-ships, and the idea that a mere Red Planeter would use a Jewel for a personal power-source was seen as the height of arrogance.

J may have given up his wings, but he wore his Jewels as a badge of pride, as part of his due for participating in a war which saved the whole galaxy. But he lived alone, and there was no one to sneer at the waste of energy that kept his heart pumping and his connection to his AI strong. 

On closer inspection, the G-Stone in the woman’s palm was small, weak compared to the Strong G-Stones now being produced by the Greens, but still pulsing with power enough to flicker the lights and make the compound hum with the latent energy.

The impossibility of it - the pinnacle of Green technology held in the hand of a creature so flawed as to be slowly self-destructing under its own design - was hard to fathom for the former soldier. It was wrong, on every level he could conceive, and it was difficult to imagine any set of circumstances that could have led to the situation.

But Tomoro recovered much faster, and crowed.

“Oh, this solves _everything_! Go get a Saldare arm from storage!”

J, still stunned, followed the order without question, leaving the medical bay behind with some relief. The woman had just complicated his life a hundredfold, and his mind whirled with what he could possibly do with her. Obviously keep her alive as best they could. But beyond that...The storm cut them off from any contact with the wider world. Even if he could turn her over to the authorities, his instincts warred against it, distrusting the government that had so casually shoved him aside when they no longer had a use for him. Plus, there would be questions, questions he and Tomoro could not yet answer, and that would lead to teams sent to his compound, filling his life with Green and Red underlings, invading his life and breaking the silence he had come to love. 

It had been almost a full year since any other organic had visited the compound. It had been built with a mind for expansion, as a retreat for retired Soldatos, to help them reintegrate into civilian life. But after J, no other Soldatos - or Armas, or Saldares - had been assigned. The whole bunker was five times too large for one man, with supplies enough that he needed to travel to the nearest town at most once a season, and then usually just to collect his payment for the oxygen and other gases his arrays supplied.

He had grown into the silence, sometimes going weeks without speaking except to mentally call out to Tomoro. During the summer there was endless work, but bringing on extra help seemed largely unnecessary when he simply could work an extra night, put off more sleep, and send the money on to more mechanical upgrades for the arrays rather than the hassle of training new help.

For all those reasons most of the compound was abandoned. The smallest kitchen and monitor rooms was all he usually used. Dust and sand coated the floors of the specialty storage rooms, filled with supplies for the veterans that never came, while extra bunks were piled high in half-finished rooms, and communication arrays were collapsed and ready to be stripped for parts.

It was only when he brushed the dust off of the Saldare components that he realized what Tomoro was planning, and the idea jolted him out of his brooding. 

He arrived back at the medical bay at a run, the prosthetic under his arm, swearing, angry enough to speak aloud.

“Tomoro, you can not use a G-Stone to regulate her power!”

The AI’s focus on its patient didn’t shift, but it sent a gif of a rolling eye in J’s direction.

“The Stone is all that’s keeping her alive right now. And no one else is using it.”

“That’s not the point! That thing is a time bomb. We don’t know why she has it. We don’t know why she’s here. We don’t know if she _deserves_ it.”

“Hush. You might wake her.” Tomoro chided. “What does any of that matter, anyways? She needs help, and I have the tools to help her. We can interrogate her afterward, if you want, but now I need to concentrate. Building a whole GS-Ride system from scratch, and working it into alien physiology - is a lot harder than I’m making it look!”

\---------- 

“Shit. She’s waking up.”

J had stopped trying to argue with his AI, and was now standing in a corner, arms crossed, out of the way and trying not to glare. He didn’t notice the shift in her brain waves, and only Tomoro’s warning allowed him to notice the sudden stiffness in the woman’s form. Her closed eyes, beneath the fractured visor, barely flickered, and there was no hitch in her breathing as she came online. This despite the amount of pain she must have been in - exposed nerves, damaged organics, and what Tomoro insisted were pain receptors wired into her mechanics for what appeared to be no other reason than spite.

“You’re sure she’s awake?” He asked aloud, perhaps redundantly. 

“I’m not sure about anything with this. But her brain seems close enough to yours…”

He watched as her undamaged hand drifted slowly closer to the scalpel he had discarded, moving closer even as the rest of her body remained still. He moved forward just as she reached it, placing his own hand on hers as she grasped the weapon.

Her eyes snapped open, and only the extreme damage to her form prevented her from vaulting from the table. Instead her internal motors screamed with the attempt to move and she was racked with a hacking cough.

When the cough subsided and yet J had made no move to take back the scalpel, she tried to speak.

""Où est-ce je suis?""

J looked blank at the foreign sound of her language, and turned to Tomoro.

“It's not in my databases.”

Her voice shifted, becoming nasal and arrogant, and she asked, ""Who are you?""

With no more response than the last time, she tried again. ""Wǒ fāshēng shénme shìle?"" This time her words were short, but her voice modulated in a way almost musical.

""Wo bin ich?"" She coughed this one, an almost guttural bark.

""min 'ant?"" The words bled into each other.

Then, desperately, as another cough racked her system, ""Qu'as-tu fait pour moi?""

Tomoro made distressed clicks. “She's cycling through different languages. But I don't recognize any of them!”

""Anata wa watashi ni nani o shimashita ka?""  
"Dónde estoy?""  
""Kto ty?""  
""Please, say something.""

She tried again, and J could sense through his Jewel equal parts anger and fear in her. Unsurprising, really. But instead of speaking he pressed his hand on hers, then pointed to the prosthetic arm at her side. She barely could turn her head to see it, but her eyes widened in understanding the instant she did so. She glanced down at her own destroyed arm, then back up at him. Then he raised his own arm and tapped his J-Jewel. He pointed to her hand, where the G-Stone was still fused, and towards the prosthetic again, indicating the slot reserved for J-Jewels that Tomoro hopped to modify to fit the Stone.

Tension bled out of her then, in equal parts from the sight of the J-Jewel as from the simplified explanation. Her head thumped back onto the table, and she nodded her head - though there was no way to know if that meant agreement or had some other meaning to her species.

“Tomoro, can you bring up a readout of her system? She may not be able to understand our words, but surely she can understand pictures.”

The AI obliged, the rudimentary scans he had taken appearing on half a dozen screens over the table. The woman winced at the sudden influx of light, but seemed to understand when Tomoro flashed a marker on the damage had found in her systems.

Her eyes fought to focus, and Tomoro moved the screen closer, even as he created a graphic of what he planned to do, showing the G-Stone being inserted into the Saldare arm, then attached over the image of the mangled remains of the woman’s arm. Green lines of power coursed through the image upon contact, indicating the flow of GS Power. Then Tomoro reversed the flow, showing the overheated areas of her anatomy cooling from blue to red as blue power bled into the G-Stone.

Her expression knotted in what appeared to be confusion, but she held up a shaking finger and traced the image, pointing out areas and presumably speaking their names. J was surprised at how well she seemed to understand her own internals; occasionally tapping on the screen lightly to point out damage that Tomoro had yet to find. 

“Can you tell her that we have to do this quickly?” Tomoro asked.

“Just show her internals shutting down.”

The AI obliged, and the Prosthetic and G-Stone display disappeared, and a loop of various components of her system breaking played, mechanics melting or flickering out on the picture, each time speeding up. Her expression turned grim. Then she bobbed her head up and down again and moved her damaged hand towards the screen.

“What does she mean?” The AI asked.

“I think she’s giving you the stone. Presumably that means she is consenting to the procedure.”

“It's not like she has much choice.”

Privately, J agreed, but simply from the grim expression on the woman's face he guessed that she would have fought hard against them trying anything without her consent, no matter how much she would have damaged herself in the process. And now that she was awake he suspected that she would fight to remain that way, despite the agony that she was about to endure.

“I’m going to have to cut the stone out of her. When that happens all of her internals will go into overdrive. If the transfer takes more than five minutes, we might lose her. Even then, I’ll have to run the GS conduites all at once. I don’t know how her body will react to any of it.” For the first time there was a tinge of worry to Tomoro’s normally spritely voice. “Do...Do you think she’ll be able to survive that?” 

J shifted, trying to think of a way to communicate the gravity of the situation. Tomoro’s dire warnings flashed on the screen, red to blue, green to red, surely enough to give the woman an idea.

But her eyes went to her unbroken hand, where his own still rested.

""You can touch me"" She said, in the first language she had used. Her eyes were wide, and for the first time J felt something other than dark emotions from her. ""How can you touch me?""

Unable to respond, he simply grasped her hand, and the whirl of emotions from her evened out. In her other hand, the G-Stone flared, reacting to the courage and hope she felt.

It was all they had to go on.

“Alright, Tomoro. Start the procedure.”

\------------------------------ 

In the next four hours, J learned quite a bit about the woman, and about her species in general.

They were like Green Planeters in more than just form. They screamed when in pain, and their bodies moved on instinct even when they fought hard to control them. They wept liquid from their eyes and skin. They were noisy, and babbled without sense, unlike a Soldato, whose circuits would simply shut down when overloaded. 

But no Green he had ever met had a grip strong enough to bruise his hand, and the woman had that, holding onto him throughout the whole procedure, as if he was an anchor in a storm, the only thing holding her to sanity. 

J didn’t remember much of his own transition into a Soldato body. The pain he had felt had been dulled by drugs and feed-back dampeners. It was the added senses that stood out most clearly; the moment when he opened his eyes and saw color for the first time. When he turned and could feel the magnetic pull of the planet within his skull, or the first time he saw sunlight above the clouds and could instantly place where he was above the planet’s surface. 

He wondered if the woman would feel the same way he had when his J-Jewel had come on line. There was no honor in this case, no ceremony or congratulations, just ugly practicality that might be stolen the instant someone realized that an unworthy was using a G-Stone. But surely she would feel the same clarity, the sudden feeling of the world shifting into focus as the inexplicable emotional energies around him became something no longer hidden behind frozen, stoic expressions, but instead a palpable landscape, coloring the world in joy and anger, courage and fear, a million shades of meaning suddenly crystallized into the thrumming energy of the universe.

Of course, perhaps she would feel none of that, isolated as she was on the outpost, only two other conscious beings in a hundred miles, and only one other crystal power source. Would she even sense his Jewel? He could feel hers, feel the bond that had been created between the woman and the G-Stone even before Tomoro attached it properly. Even after the AI had cut it from her hand, causing every machine within her to screech and begin to melt down while the lights sputtered and flickered, the Stone pulsed to her heart-beat. It reached out to her, warping the ambient energy in a mechanical attempt to reunite with its master.

That, by itself, was a clear indication of the woman’s character. G-Stones were rumored to only bond with those capable of strong courage, just as J-Jewels bonded with those with strong abilities to persevere. It was one of the reasons Strong G-Stones were now being produced on the Green Planet, saving the elites from the need to win approval from a mindless crystal. 

If the woman knew anything at all about the properties of the Stone she had stolen, perhaps that was why she had chosen to trust J and Tomoro. J-Jewels were only given to the honorable among the Red Planeters, the elite warriors who became the Soldatos. No Soldato would harm a helpless innocent. The Jewel would never bond with someone who did so. And while the woman might not fit into the category of ‘innocent’, she was next to helpless and certainly in need of aid. Only a monster would cause her more harm than necessary, and the Stones and Jewels would not abide cruelty. There were stories of Stones shattering in their owners bodies if their masters tried it.

Or perhaps the woman simply was familiar with pain. Her body showed the signs of it, even as Tomoro did his best to rework the atrocious systems. Viscous liquids were drained from her veins, metal filings removed from internal mechanics, steam vented through what appeared to be some kind of primitive cooling system...Her system was madness, and that madness must have taken its toll upon her psyche. Everything on her leaked, from bruised veins, broken tubing, to her skin itself, weeping salted liquid that evaporated the instant it hit the air, a waste that any Red Planet Scientist would have screamed in horror at. That she was sane at all was a testament to how strong she could be with a GS system fueling her. 

They almost lost her twice, once when they removed the Stone initially, and again when they reconnected it half an hour later. Even while her organics accepted the GS energy, fail-safes across her system reacted violently to the influx of power, and several of her primary organs froze, leaving her red-faced and gasping, even as the central muscle in her chest went into electrical spasms. It was only when Tomoro realized that a component was intentionally shocking the organ that they were able to bring her body back to homeostasis. 

Throughout it all, Tomoro was the hero. J simply sat and held the woman’s hand, or offered extra muscle to hold her still during delicate procedures. The AI was tasked with something no machine should ever have been expected to perform. Of course he had been given basic surgery protocols when assigned to the outpost, but a trained Saldara cyborgization technician would have balked at the task, much less a machine with half the equipment needed and a fourth of the knowledge. 

Still, somehow, they came through the other end. After four hours the woman was stable. Her design would win no awards, but she breathed easy on the table and the G-Stone pulsed steadily on her arm. It was only then her eyes closed, and for a moment J’s heart seized with worry, only to be assured by Tomoro that her brain-waves had simply relaxed. 

“She’s sleeping.” The AI assured him. “I think she’ll live.”

\----------------------------------- 

After the procedure was done, and the woman sleeping peacefully in the medical room, J found himself oddly at loose ends. Tomoro had dimmed the lights, blanketing the woman in darkness, but still observed her carefully through his sensors. He would be at work, trying to puzzle out the intricacies of her system and language, for hours, leaving J with nothing to do.

There was little enough to do around the compound, but the lack of action grated upon him more strongly than ever before. When the storm abated he fled outside with a degree of relief, finally with something to do, even better something to do that took him away from the woman and back into the realm of normality.

Out on the plain there were arrays to inspect, filters to clean, sails to repair. The wind had slowed to a stiff breeze, the slowest it ever got on the planet’s surface, and it was easy enough to push through and return to his daily routine. First, the big windmills, built on Green-Planet designs to look like flowers, each petal a different color with a slightly different function. There had been a push to bring the more efficient fully organic power-generators to the Red Planet, but no Green bio-machine could survive the harsh conditions on the surface. So they were relegated to mechanics, and the two mills had been the most expensive part of the outpost’s construction. Two years later and they were still cutting edge, and J had unhesitatingly spent the money for their upkeep.

Luckily, they had not been damaged by the storm, beyond the standard scratches on the petal coating and sand finding its way into every possible crevice. The task of brushing away and removing the sand took a good three hours, delicate work that would have had J’s teachers at the academy laughing themselves silly. But over the years he had spent on the farm he had forced his pride down, tucked it behind his teeth and blown it out with his breath, removing tiny grains of resentment along with the sand that could undermine the functioning of the whole farm.

The work was meditative, in its way. Slide through the wind. Slow the machine. Climb the pole, or ladder. Inspect every crack, every memorized crevice, as he climbed to the top. Clean the motors, the fins, the tiny energy intakes. Then carefully - carefully - start the machine again. From the ground, watch as the whole thing spun into motion. Listen to its hum, straining against the wind for any discordance that might indicate a broken or misaligned part, or remaining sand within the machine’s heart.

Then on to the arrays themselves, the pale sails that used the mills' energy to strain essential gasses from the poisonous atmosphere. They were spaced evenly along the plain, some reaching five stories in height and stretching a block wide when fully extended. Each had its own steel circle, with ropes automated to turn the sail into the wind. Cleaning the rails of debris was a daily task, one which might have eaten fingers, had J anyone less sensible - or anyone else at all - to help him. As it was, there were half a hundred arrays that would need to be inspected over the course of a week or so, many of which would have been damaged in the sudden storm. 

J was half way up his third array, a small nitrogen collector that whined audibly, when Tomoro informed him that the woman had woken up.

“Do you need me?” J asked through his com-link to the AI, his helmet readout mostly filled with damage predictions and x-rays of the internal blockages on the array, giving no space for Tomoro to send through video.

“Not yet. She’s still kind of groggy. But we’re working through her language. By the time you get back, we should be able to communicate.”

J silently agreed with the AIs assessment, and went back to work, trying to avoid the feeling that he was running away from a problem. 

He had saved the woman, hadn’t he? But it had been a challenge then - fighting the storm and returning a hero. The idea of someone in his space, using his facilities and taking up his time and resources...that was different. Tomoro was more than happy to have a guest, but J wasn’t sure what to feel. He hadn’t shared space with someone for over three years, and now the mere idea of it sent him off-kilter, fleeing into the desert rather than think too long on it. 

But Tomoro knew what to do, and there was work to be done on the arrays. And that work would let thousands breath, and live, and create, all a million klomets away. His work let them live, and wasn’t that a much easier way to be a hero? To never be seen or bothered…


	3. Friends in Strange Places

“These AIs...do they have souls?” Cain asked.

The Chinese general they were interviewing - Dr. Yan - looked at him sharply. “What does that matter? They are tools. And these tools will do much good for China.”

Cain gaped, mouth open to start a philosophical debate, when Liger patted him on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it, friend. Their AIs are based on ChoRyu and EnRyu. And you would say that those two have souls, correct?”

Cain paused, mind knotting around the problem, then sighed and nodded. Dr. Yan smiled triumphantly, and they finished their conference call with an agreement for Cain to come and visit the two G-Stone powered robots when their chassis were complete.

When the call ended, he turned to Liger.

“The priests on my world will demand proof of your AIs souls. You humans skirt close to heresy by giving consciousness to machines.”

“Mmm. You’re worried we might lose control of them, like you did with your Zonders?” 

Cain considered. “Perhaps not from these ‘Chinese'. But you Americans - and Japanese as well, seem to exert no _control_ over your AIs at all!”

Liger kicked back, thinking of the Mic series back at NASA. It was Cain who had convinced him to curtail the AIs' abilities to transform, lest they use their destructive powers against the Earth. Fine enough for The 13th, who interacted regularly with the public, but even the most childish of the Mics seemed more likely to hurt others through an accident, rather than malicious intent. 

Ironic, really, that Mic the 13th was currently getting along better with Mamoru than Cain was. The childish robot loved the little boy, and was excited to learn of all the human games and interact with his friends, while Cain seemed only to care about Earth as a means to his goal of returning home with his son.

“Well, we didn’t program them to replicate, which probably helps. But maybe we don’t worry about that so much because we treat them just like humans. Swan and GGG were there the whole time while ChoRyu and EnRyu were in development, raising them more like kids than machines. An’ you can see it, right? I don’t have any proof of a “soul" in their AIs...But then again, we humans don’t have any proof of that in organics either. Our ‘proof' is the way they jump in to protect people. Even if that puts them in danger. A simple machine wouldn’t do that. But they’ve been able to unlock way more of the G-Stone’s potential than even some of your scientists. And I can’t help but think that’s cus they have the emotions to care about the people around them.”

\-----------------

She woke in the darkness. That, in itself, was not particularly unusual. Nor was the pain, though this time was oddly dull, and though her chest hurt the searing, never ending heat that plagued her days seemed to have taken a bit of a holiday.

The floating eyeball was a bit of a surprise, though. 

She squinted into the darkness above her, but the apparition only blurred. It didn’t become a lamp, or a heating device, or anything remotely sensible. It was an eyeball. Orange, about the size of a basketball, hovering in space. 

Something spoke.

“Ah, you’re awake. I’ll tell J.”

The words meant nothing to her, but the eyeball constricted itself to look as if it was smiling. The fog in her mind was beginning to clear, though the insanity of the world around her was making her doubt that a bit. She tried to sit up.

“Don’t get up yet!”

She paused, uncertain what the eyeball said, but recognizing the tone. She hated herself for the way her heart-beat quickened, fearing retribution or further pain. But instead, the bench beneath her - to which, for once, she was not strapped in - contorted, pushing her up slowly into a sitting position without any effort on her part being needed.

The kindness made her suspicious. Memories were beginning to trickle back, most tinged with worse pain than usual, and the impossible idea that she could have escaped began to itch at her. But she had felt that way before...surely it couldn’t be true this time?

“Okay, are you comfortable? I’m going to brighten the room.”

Low lights sprang up around them, showing what was surely some kind of medical bay, tinged in red by the floor lights. But more importantly, the added light showed the insanity of the eyeball was on a clear monitor, sending a wave of relief through her. An avatar. Perhaps a highly realistic one, but there wasn’t an actual floating eyeball watching her. 

Noone else was in the room, though she seemed to remember another figure, tall and lean, carrying her through the pain and…

Her whirling mind stopped. The memory showed the figure holding her hand. And that...that was impossible. No one could touch her. The instant they did, they would burn.

But the figure hadn’t even flinched. That alone should have been reason enough to doubt her memories. Maybe this all was a hallucination. Or a dream.

If so, it was tempting to stay in it for a bit longer. Here it didn’t hurt. Here something - or someone - was being kind. Here was...nice.

The monitor holding the eye lowered itself towards her.

Then, in the oddest hallucination yet, it spoke in perfect French,

""Who are you?""

\---------------------- 

An AI was the perfect learning tool, though Renais didn’t know it at the time. It excelled at things that frustrated both humans and computers alike.

Take language, for example.

""Who are you?""

It was a phrase she had asked half a dozen times when she had first woken up. Somehow the AI had understood its meaning, and now parroted it back to her, using almost the exact same voice.

""Renais Cardiff.""

The eyeball on the screen bobbed happily.

""I Tomoro.""

""Tomoro?""

""Yes. Tomoro.""

Humans - and most aliens, as she later found out - are language machines for around five years. That’s long enough to learn one, maybe two languages. And then that part of the brain shuts down, to give resources to other parts. Renais’ own mind had been enhanced to allow her to learn more, but it still took weeks of effort to learn a language to any degree of fluency. It was all repetition for humans, forcing the new words and ideas into a brain that had grown to no longer absorb them.

""Tomoro help."" The screen said.

Then pictures appeared over the eye. Little stick figures running. Jumping. Floating. 

Renais looked closer, completely unable to identify the point in the last picture. But she pointed to the others and named the action.

Tomoro flashed the final picture. ""No?""

“Non.” She replied, and a new set appeared.

What followed was hours of work, of pointing to pictures and colors and miming actions. 

A simple computer could have never done it. The challenge of a simple logic system was that humans - and many aliens - did not operate on logic, especially when it came to language. They had perfect memory, but no instinct when it came to the way language could change and shift. A word with two meanings would send a computer into fits, never certain how to translate it, and good luck trying to explain longer turns of phrase or the subtle shifts in meaning that came with humor or sarcasm. 

Tomoro had the best of both worlds. Renais needed to only explain something once, and he was able to remember it. But she could correct something, or add nuance to its meaning, and the AI would understand.

""A Planet goes round a Sun."" And she held her hands in the air, miming a small thing circling a much larger thing.

""We have three suns.""

""What?"" No translation error there; the AI pulled up a picture of their solar system, same long loops to indicate orbits as in every Earth child’s textbook, made impossible by the core. Three suns, looping each other, and further out, not drawn to scale, two planets then an asteroid belt. Each were color-coded: white suns, a green planet, a red planet, and purple asteroids.

Helpfully, the AI indicated each and repeated the obvious names.

""This the Trinary Solar System. We have Green Planet, Red Planet, and Purple Planet.""

She pointed to the screen, to the purple asteroids. ""That is not a planet.""

The AI considered, beeping in what Renais intuited as an indication of thought.

""What it?"" it asked.

""An asteroid belt.""

An image of a floating rock appeared ""Asteroid?""

""Yes.""

A stick figure appeared, its waist looped round with a squiggle rope.

""Belt?""

""Yes.""

""I understand. The Purple Planet is Name. Not Meaning.""

And the AI understood that. It understood the difference, yet knew every word after only a cursory explanation. Teaching it wasn’t perfect, but it was a thousand times easier than when Renais learned herself, after her memory enhancements, and a million times easier than when she had laboriously learned English in school. 

No endless repetitions. No stupid tests, or unnecessary words, or asshole teachers trying to trip you up. And the AI moved on quickly to more important questions.

""Where am I?"" She asked during their discussion of planets.

""The Red Planet.""

""What is it like? I remember...not being able to breath. The air hurt. And there was...rain? And sand? It _all_ hurt.""

""Normal people can breath not on the surface."" A cheerful infographic appeared, surely pulled from some online directory, since it had helpful text plastered over it.

It showed a cross section of the Red Planet. High in the air was a balloon city, connected to the surface by a long, thin line. Maybe the text explained how it stayed afloat, but Renais could no more understand the writing than she did the Reds language. 

Below the city there were swirling clouds, all colored orange, which spoke across cultural barriers of menace. The surface was aired, covered in black mountains and jagged canyons. Beneath that, deep underground by the looks of things, were cave-like cities, with their own artificial green colored light. They looked big, though scale was obviously skewed on the map.

But between the cloud cities and the subterranean ones, there was...nothing. Just little white bumps on the surface, so tiny they were mostly covered by the text.

""We’re about...here."" A globe appeared next to the graphic, with a dot for their location. ""The nearest sub-station is about 200 klomets away.""

""How far is a klomet?"" That took them down the winding path of times and distances, and establishing and idea of how Earth compared to the Red Planet; ten minutes of defining a second and a yard, leading to the discovery that the Red Planet had longer days and a double-length year compared to Earth. But eventually they worked their way back to the real question. "" So roughly 2000 kilometers to the nearest town. That’s a full day’s trip?""

""Just about. We don’t visit much. Even my connection is weak, this far away.""

""And outside is...breathable death. And sandstorms. And acid rain. And there’s basically no way to get a signal out, even on good days.""

""...yes. Tomoro is sorry. You got rescued in a bad place.""

""Bad?"" Renais looked at the map, and around at the darkened medical room that had no shackles, and back to the friendly AI. ""No. This is amazing. Better than amazing. It's _perfect_.""  
\----------------------- 

Another hour and Tomoro felt he could understand the woman a bit better. More than that, he felt that he could trust her, a fact that would have J groaning at the naivety of it. He hadn’t asked anything about her history, knowing that J would get better answers, but enough had trickled out that he suspected even the prickly former Soldato would have no problems hosting her until the worst of winter was over.

So, when she asked if she could see the compound he happily obliged, not noticing her shocked expression, but feeling the surprise emanating from the G-Stone. Eventually they would have to teach her to hide that, but until then he basked in the feeling of a different set of emotions from the ever-stoic J.

Renais, for her part, managed to flatter the AI constantly, completely without realizing it, and the AI preened under her attention, proudly bragging about his domain.

First, of course, was clothing, a fact that neither J or Tomoro had considered, but was apparently of the utmost importance to the human. 

""Is the temperature not to your liking? J’s out, so I could change it…""

""No, no. It’s just...humans need clothing to feel comfortable. It’s considered - uh - rude, otherwise.""

""Oh. Another ‘culture' thing?""

""...right.""

""Well, you are Saldara-sized, so they uniforms should fit. This way, please!""

Helpfully, strips of lights near the floor brightened, and guided Renais forward and into the greater compound.

""Tomoro's never given a tour before! This will be fun! So! This is the main hub of we's outpost. It was supposed to be for meetings, but with just two of us J’s made it over to training room.""

Renais carefully slotted the idea of ‘training' into the image she had of her mysterious savior. Apparently that training required wide open spaces and retractable couches that had the look of having been used for punching bags more than sitting.

""The main food room is powered down, that’s the room to your right.""

Renais peeked in, but only got the sense of a cavernous space, the hidden kitchen furnishings completely alien to her.

""J doesn’t really...eat. But he has private Maker set in his rooms. If you system needs more than just GS Energy, you can use that. Left is the monitor room - that’s fully powered.""

That much was obvious. Even with the dulled lights, the room was full of screens, at least double the number of the small med room. They hugged the curved walls, making Renais notice how the rest of the compound had similarly round rooms; the layout growing in her mind made of circles leading off the main round hub, which was itself a half-circle abutting the thick wall of the canyon that protected them from the howling winds outside.

So. The med-bay was small, right next to the monitor room. The commander’s suit was on the other side of the monitor room. All were deep into the rock, the most protected and the closest to whatever was the power-source that ran the place.

Renais paused at the entrance to the monitor room, one hand instinctively over her breasts, watching the images on the incomprehensible monitors. Even the feeds that looked like pure video were boggling, showing a landscape that glowed orange and seemed to pulse as cloud-shadows streamed across the horizon faster than any wind on Earth could carry. 

But what was important was the set-up of the room, one that Renais noticed with practiced ease. There was only one, floating, chair, but the monitors were set up in three separate banks. Despite the visuals being incomprehensible, she could clearly see the difference between the three stations, each set showing different arrays of data. So this compound was not just understaffed - it have never been designed for one individual, even at the beginning. She carefully slotted the information away, along with everything else that she had noticed that Tomoro had not specifically commented on.

""Across the way. That’s where we’re going. We’ve got much things in storage.""

She followed the ground lights around the outskirts of the main room, noting the odd triangular door over the captain’s quarters. A similar door hissed open when she finally reached the far wall and entered the first true hallway she’d seen. Most of the rooms simply led straight into one another, but this one was different. First was a waiting area, with a rather frightening looking door hanging open by what was clearly quartermaster's desk. It looked as if it had never been used, nor had the low bench against one wall and the monitors along the other five walls. 

""Why the heavy door?""

""Places like this are attacked by - what do you call people to take things that not theirs?""

""Thieves.""

""Right. Outposts closer to cities are attacked by thieves. Especially big ones, like this was supposed to be. But we’re so far away, no one has ever tried. Sad, because J would love the challenge.""

Renais hid a smile at the mental image of alien bandits, attacking alien homesteads, being pushed back by alien farmers. Perhaps things weren’t so different between their species after all.

""So you go three doors down, to the Saldare warehouse.""

She followed his orders while asking,""What is a Saldare? You’ve used that word a bunch. I’ve got a Saldare arm, will get Saldare clothing, am a Saldare size...is that just a Female Red-Planeter?""

“No. Saldare is...design? A full design by the attack makers. They were machine-repair during the Zonder crisis. Soldatos are fighters, Saldare repair, Arma weapons. J is Soldato.""

""So they’re all military cyborgs? Or are they Androids - artificial intelligences with person-like bodies?""

The corridor she was going down sloped deeper into the rock of the canyon, which made sense if one wanted to protect the supplies inside. The triangle door of the Saldare wing slid open as she approached, and the lights that snapped on were the harsh, industrial type that had her eyes streaming in pain at the brightness. 

The first thing she saw was a full mannequin, each limb hanging seperate, face empty but creepily human. It was missing an arm - her arm - but had a half dozen replacements on the shelf behind it. 

""Androids are bad. Worse. Um...evil? They are against the rules. Full cyborgs are bad, too, but we needed them during the crisis. Now most have been transferred back into biological bodies. So we got manys of replacement parts, since no one else needed them.""

The difference between Red Planet tech and that of Earth was staggering. Humans had just begun the first experiments with augmented bodies, but here they could not only make complete cyborgs, but transfer consciousness back and forth multiple times.

""Here your clothes."" An automated arm moved through the warehouse, bearing a tray of bright cloth. ""You need more protection outside, full armor, but this should good for now.""

Renais withheld her judgement, but examined the suit anyways. It was a pale pink, run through with purple seams and an adjustable v-necked front. But there were struts for armor on the back, padding on the front and areas round the hips to attach whatever the Reds considered belts. 

""No pockets?"" She asked as she pulled the garment on, the material stretching but not burning at her touch.

""What is pockets?""

""Extra bits of fabric that you can hold things in.""

""Why build that into the suit, when you possible add them to outside?""

""Fair point."" 

The suit was only a bit loose, made for someone a bit taller and with a smaller chest and hips. Larger in the crotch, though. She wondered what a Saldara looked like, then the uniform twitched and resized around her, causing her to swear.

""What does - ""

""A bad word, Tomoro. Don't say it.""

""Okay. Do you need anything else?""

""Honestly? I don’t know.""

""Well, just ask if you think of it! Everything we have is very - do you have word for only used as tools?""

""Practical.""

""Everything we have is practical. But no one else use it…""

""I’ll remember that. Thank you, Tomoro.""

The AI’s circuits fizzed with pleasure. Compared to what he remembered of the cities, and what he could glean from holo-vids, the outpost was not someplace anyone would want to visit. In his attempts to be the best overseer possible, he had researched how other distant farms were run, and had found constant negative feedback. There were dozens of farms, just like theirs, that had been abandoned due to their staff going mad from loneliness and isolation, some turning to banditry just to find a break from their lonely routine. 

Perhaps Renais would feel that way as well. Right now she needed time to rest and recuperate, but after that...would she come to hate the howling winds and hidden sky as much as the mad farmers? 

""What now?""

Tomoro turned his attention back to his charge, finding her examining a Saldare shield generator from a careful distance - sensible, given how the flimsy pink field it emitted could slice through stone. 

""Um. I not know."" Tomoro had no face, so it couldn’t flush, but he contrived to sound chagrined. ""We not...we’ve never have visitors.""

She stepped back from the shield and weapons array, and said, ""Usually when greeting guests, hosts offer them a room. Humans need rest periods, to sleep...or recharge if you’re a cyborg."" She paused as she left the storage room, door swished shut behind her. ""Past the mess hall, there were private rooms, correct? For workers?""

""Yes! You can have one of those! The first one is best!""

The AI’s enthusiasm made Renais smile, even as she hid the tiny gun-like item she’d taken from the warehouse. If she could figure out how it worked, without alerting the AI, she would have some kind of protection in this strange place. Not that she felt she needed it...but past experience had taught her never to take things as they seemed.

""Does it have a bathroom?"" She asked as she turned and headed back towards the main room, following her memory now more than Tomoro’s lights.

""What is bathroom?""

Renais considered how to explain the concept to an AI...and to fight back her own shame at the idea. Tomoro wouldn’t understand why humans avoided discussing such things. ""A place to clean oneself and remove bodily wastes.""

""Shouldn’t you do that in the med-room?""

She shook her head. ""Not mechanical waste - organic waste. Is that something your people don’t do?""

Tomoro considered. It wasn’t a topic that often came up in his conversations with J. ""This is like how you body not good released liquid during the operation?""

""We call it crying, when it’s from the eyes."" Another thing that she might have felt shame at, once. But her creators had seen far worse from her. There were those who had laughed as she cried, but those were the ones who regretted their actions the quickest.

""How wasteful! But yes, we have something like that. Greens require the same kind of ‘bathroom’ as one you describe. J’s quarters have one, and the one in your area was supposed to be share, but…""

""...But there’s no one else to use it but me.""

""Yes. But you shouldn’t need it much. You G-Stone will deal with your energy needs, and we can flush your systems from the medical room.""

""Yeah. That’s fine. I just don’t want to live in there.""

_"Where you live remains to be seen."_

Renais reacted on instinct, jerking backwards, drawing her improvised weapon and pressing her back to the nearest wall, motion as familiar as breathing, G-Stone reacting instantly to her willingness to face the problem.

There was a man in the main room - one who had remained completely still until she had almost walked over him, internals running so silently that she hadn’t noticed him until he spoke. He was tall - bigger even than her cousin Guy, easily twice her height - and lean, muscles corded on arms that were crossed over his chest. He wore some kind of armor, built on the same lines as the Saldaras’ but bulkier and with a dull red glow emanating from the gauntlets. Beneath it was a skin-tight suit, a twin to hers but all in black, leaving no doubt that his body was just as well-muscled as his arms. 

If Red Planeters were built anything like humans, the man before her was either a dancer or a fighter, and Renais would bet heavily on the latter. He towered over her, even with two meter’s distance between them, expression unreadable under a shock of green hair. His features were as angular as his form, strong chin and cheekbones from where she could see through the fringe. But his nose was more beak than human, and his hair fell like feathers, not fur. The impossibility of a human form merged with something almost alien.

"Oh! Hi, J! I didn’t sense you come in!" Tomoro chimed, then said in French, ""Renais, this is J. He’s the one who saved you. He wants to ask you some questions.""

Carefully she lowered the - whatever the thing was she’d grabbed. 

He said something in his language, and Tomoro quickly translated.

""He compliments you on your choice of weapon. He thought you distance warrior, though.""

Renais kept her eyes from darting to the device in her hand. It looked like a futuristic space-gun. Apparently it wasn’t. 

""Do you want it back?""

Tomoro parroted her words back, and the man - J - sneered when he answered.

""He says that only fool would give up they only weapon. Then he said you should keep it until you know how to use it.""

Renais considered offering Tomoro some more untranslatable words to give the man, but held her tongue. Instead, ""Thank him for saving me, please. I will answer his questions.""

""Do you want to sit down? He didn’t say that, but you should be comfortable.""

The man’s lips pursed, but Tomoro was already acting, and two relatively undamaged square cushions raised from the floor, while a bright light turned on and basked the two in a circle of warm, yellow glow.

Cautiously Renais walked forward into the light, but waited before sitting. She hated when her creators interrogated her, or worse when they stood around her, arguing, while she was stuck, immobile and only able to listen. She was always below them, and they lorded it over her even as they forgot that there could be any other way.

The moment lengthened, the man’s face unreadable, watching her from behind his fringe, before he nodded, once, and sat, motioning her to do the same. 

When he spoke again, it was with an air of authority that set her teeth on edge, but could hardly be faulted. If she understood Tomoro correctly, this “J” was the commander of the outpost, and everything in it answered to him. 

Plus, he’d saved her, and in plenty of cultures that meant she owed him. What she owed him would be up for debate, and she’d figure out her weapon very fast if he tried anything, but for now it was set on the hard table Tomoro kindly raised between them.

“Who are you?" He asked, and Tomoro translated.

""Renais Cardiff. A human of Earth.""

“0117 ( _that’s me! added Tomoro_ ) says you come from the Blue Planet.” 

""That was what we decided, yes. Earth of Sol, the Blue Planet by your naming.""

“How did you come here?”

Renais shifted in her seat. ""There are words Tomoro doesn’t know, yet…""

The man sneered. 

""He says that he is patient, and will wait.""

She sighed, but said, ""Very well. You know that your Green Planet has contacted my Earth.""

J nodded, and said something that was clearly only meant for Tomoro, as it remained untranslated. His lips had not moved as he said it, but Renais sensed the tiny sound anyways. Sub-vocalizations? Or a telekinetic bond that she could overhear?

""It was the first major contact we’d ever had with a - do you know alien? - with an alien civilization. A man named Cain offered G-Stone’s to the world’s scientific community.""

“Inferior G-Stones. The ones the elites did not want.” Tomoro’s high voice seemed completely at odds with J’s stern tone. 

""Maybe they’re not the best, but they’re amazing for us. Your technology is far beyond ours. A bunch of different organizations received G-Stones, based on their research. One of those organizations was a company called Bio-Net.""

\------------------------------------------------------- 

Slowly the faulty cyborg’s story came out, and J was left alternatively horrified and seething. But much more was simply baffling to the Red Planeter. 

As he understood it, through Tomoro’s sometimes perplexing translation, Earth did not have one central power structure. It was even more complex than the Green Planet system, which was divided easily between the Royals, Government, and Priests, all of which worked closely together. No, Earth’s system was fractured into a million pieces, with completely different governments ruling different areas, some with vastly different rules than others. As for its social system…

There was barter on the Red Planet, and payment for work done. The outpost was regularly shipped supplies in exchange for the resources it produced. But the idea of ‘corporations’ - entities more powerful than any government organization in their domain - who could shirk the law and still be allowed to continue functioning was madness. Worst still was the waste - of people, of resources, and of energy - that seemed endemic on every level of the human society Renais described.

He had never considered that there could be a worse system than that of the Greens, but here was a product of such a system, explaining how her life had been destroyed out of corporate greed and apathy, and how killing off entire people was somehow profitable for this ‘Bio-Net’. And how that company, that corporate monster, had gotten its hands on a G-Stone.

""I was taken a year before Cain made planet fall. My father is an important scientist, and Bio-Net wanted to prove to their buyers that they could take anyone, even the rich and powerful, even those who ostensibly worked for the same government. They killed my mother, but saw me as a resource - imagine their notoriety if they turned a relation of one of Earth’s Greatest Scientists into a killing machine. It was proof that they could dominate anyone, and turn even the weakest creature, a mere girl, into a monster.

""Unfortunately, they got me. I’m not very...good at following directions. Even after they ripped me to pieces, performed every experiment their fiendish minds could imagine...I still didn’t always obey orders. Working in a self-destruct function was the sensible thing. Without their machines I overheat, and could explode.” She sneered. “They thought that would make me compliant. They made it so I would hurt anyone who touched me, and any action outside their orders could result in death - my own or others.” Her expression fell, and her hands clenched. “It actually worked, for a while. The pain was so much, and it was just...easier to give in.""

_Perhaps it is a good thing she did not bring a J-Jewel._ J sent to Tomoro. _She lacks in perseverance. Abandoning her own morality so quickly…_

_Don’t be so quick to judge. Tomoro responded. You’ve seen her internals. You saw what they did to her. Humans don’t have the ability to block out pain, or repress sensations. That she’s sane at all is the surprise. I don’t think she was lacking in perseverance._

J withheld his own judgement, noticing how the woman quickly shifted the story away from her failure.

""Anyways, that’s about when Cain came to Earth, along with one of those Zonder fragments. It tried to take over a spaceship, and its pilot was seriously injured. Cain saved him, and Guy became the first G-Stone cyborg on Earth.

""After that, my project became less important, because Bio-Net got other volunteers for their program, people who wanted to be powerful like Guy. And Cain brought G-Stone power to Earth, which Bio-Net saw as an excellent opportunity. Every scientific institution was clamoring for one of the cloned Stones, and Bio-Net used its influence with the US government to be assigned one of the experiments.

""Most places focused on using the G-Stones as power sources. Japan and the US -"" Here she sketched a map of her world, and indicated the various countries. Japan seemed the most important, as Cain had chosen that location - and its scientific establishment - to work with most closely. ""Those countries developed - are continuing to develop - robots to help combat the Zonder shards.""

Here Tomoro chimed in, excited. “Humans allow AIs bodies, J! Bodies of their own, that they control!”

It was odd, hearing Tomoro speak in two languages at once, speaking so both Renais and his master could understand. It was obvious why Tomoro was so excited. Such an act was beyond heresy, according to the Green priests. It was what had created the Zonders in the first place, and as such caused a five year war that the Trinary Alliance had barely been won. Yet Cain consented to the humans experimenting with autonomous AIs. 

J wondered what would happen, if word got back to the Green planet that their King was allowing such experimentation. And with G-Stones, moreover. It would cause chaos, and the rift between priests and royalty would be exposed for all to see. 

But the end result would be no Trinary System AIs ever being given bodies, even if the humans were successful in their experiments and could prove the AIs harmless. And that meant Tomoro would be trapped, locked away from ever having true autonomy, restricted by more than just code from the wider world, for decades, if not longer.

J would never do that to his friend. They both had suffered greatly when the J-Arc was taken from them, though for completely different reasons. J lost the sky, Tomoro lost his body. J could never steal the chance - however slim - that Tomoro might one day be freed.

""I think Japan has two Androids now. They help with disasters, like Zonder attacks. And America has a team that can melt Zonders from the sky. Which is really what Bio-Net wanted to get its hands on.""

“To turn against Earth’s own people?” J was beginning to understand the kind of organization Renais had been captured by.

""Or to sell to the highest bidder, who would do the same.""

“Why would Cain ever approve such a group to be given a G-Stone, even a Weak one?” Tomoro asked the same thing J was thinking.

""Cain never saw Bio-Net. It was just another of dozens of contractors, working with Earth governments, to research the new technology. And Bio-Nets supposed experiment was so unlikely that he probably thought it would never work.

""Bio-Net wanted to recreate the Galorean Comet.""

J stiffened. The wormhole at the center of the Galorean comet was a well-kept secret of the Green Government. He only knew the truth because of his once high position in the Red Military. And if anyone ever realized that he’d used it once...well, neither he nor Tomoro would have to worry about ‘freedom’ anymore. 

“Your people have barely left their own gravity well. How could they possibly replicate the comet?”

Renais shrugged. ""Bio-Net thought it was impossible, too. They used their original G-Stone on the project, but spent most of their resources cloning G-Stones for their weapons projects."" She paused, and smiled slightly. ""Lucky for the world, G-Stones need a _mind_ to integrate with, and are very picky about the mind they choose.""

J nodded. Apparently the problem that had enraged so many on the Green Planet was being of some use to the safety of Earth.

""But I wasn’t the only experiment that Bio-Net succeeded with. Another was a child they had made into a super-genius; a little girl called Alouette. Just like my bio-enhancements increased my strength and durability, hers expanded her mind enough that 3G - the main scientific organization on Earth - used her to program their replica of Galeon and its fusion. Not knowing her background, of course. Most everyone still trusts Bio-Net.""

“Impossible.” More than impossible, it was madness. Galeon was the pride of the Green Planet, passed down through generations. The Arcs had been bad enough and the priests had railed against giving such power to the 'uncivilized' Reds even during a catastrophe. Cain allowing primitive Earthlings to have such a weapon seemed impossible. “Cain would never allow a competitor to GaoGaiGar. Nor would any human be able to pilot it, even if you did possess the technology.”

""Certainly Bio-Net was never able to replicate it, even with Alouette's help. But GaoFiGar does exist. Its fought off the Zonder shards beside Cain and GaoGar. Supposedly the pilot, Guy, so impressed Cain that he helped throughout the whole project. Apparently they use their robots to spar regularly.""

Madness. Had Cain lost his mind? Or did he really believe in humanity - the same humanity that had resulted in the woman before him - so much that he had given up every one of the Green Planet’s secrets?

_Or maybe he saw what happened during the war, and wants to make sure nothing like that ever happens again._ Tomoro whispered. _The priests undid everything we built after the war - maybe we’re not the only ones wishing for something different._

An unlikely thought, given that Cain himself had requested J’s resignation, but seemingly the only one that could explain this insanity on the part of the Trinary Solar System’s leader.

""Anyways, Alouette was assigned to the Galeorion project, probably with the intention of breaking her with an impossible problem. 

""Except she figured it out. The result wasn’t much like the Comet, at least according to the reports that Bio-Net were given by Cain, and it needed every ounce of energy it could pull from the G-Stone, but it worked. They made a portal, and it lead...here.""

_Could it be possible that they discovered how to make an ES window?_ Tomoro asked.

_Perhaps._ J replied. Its certainly more likely than recreating the comet.

“What did the portal look like?” They asked together.

""Sortof a swirling, purple oval, impossible to see through.""

""That’s an ES window!"" Tomoro happily declared, again in that double-speech, and J groaned at the AIs lack of subtlety. ""They’re easier to make than stable wormholes, but require a lot of energy. And you say one human figured it out?""

""One genius, with a whole team of scientists, the power of the G-Stone, and instructions that they would kill her mother if she didn’t succeed.""

“And she actually believed that her mother might survive?” J asked, sneering.

The look that Renais gave him was frigid cold. ""Even the most logical hold on hope for a few desperate wishes. Family is one of the strongest bonds humans can have, and some will do anything to protect it."" Then her expression softened back to the blank look she had held for most of the interview. ""Of course, that’s hardly true of everyone.""

“So they had an ES window, and a power source. That doesn’t explain how you arrived here.”

Renais returned, gratefully, to her story. ""Bio-Net hid their success from the wider scientific community. It was far better for them to seem like they were working on an impossible problem, rather than succeeding and bringing more scrutiny on their operation. As long as they kept appearing to work, they could clone the G-Stone indefinitely, and do all the cruel experiments they really wanted to do. But the temptation of another world - one perhaps with resources and people they could exploit easier than on Earth - was too great. They moved the project to the same facility they kept the most dangerous experiments, the ones that absolutely could not be discovered. My facility.""

""They were keeping me in a warehouse at the time, after I shot up one of their board meetings. They had left me hanging for two months, waiting to see how long it would take before my internals destroyed themselves, but had reassigned enough of my guard to the wormhole that I was able to escape.

""It was obvious I wouldn’t get far. I was on the verge of breakdown anyways. But I couldn’t let another planet become victim to Bio-Net. The solution was simple. I broke into the portal warehouse, intending to remove and destroy the power-source. I expected the machine to blow up in my face - but I didn’t expect it to activate while it was doing so.

""I guess it sent me here. And you know the rest. The important thing is that Bio-Net no longer has a G-Stone. Hopefully Cain won’t be so foolish as to give them another one.""

“I think the important thing is that you survived!” Tomoro said. “Even if you are stranded here.”

“I will admit it took courage to enact your plan.” J said. Certainly the evidence suggested Renais was telling the truth; her damage was indicative of a massive power surge, and the burns and decay of her mechanics agreed with her story of Bio-Net’s torchures.

The woman looked between the AI and the soldier.

“So. Will you let me stay?”


	4. Baby Steps

“I’ve got an idea, that’ll make you feel better!”

“What, Liger?”

They were waiting for a meeting with the leader of the the United State's military, who had been eager to explore the potential military applications of the G-Stone. Liger had eagerly chattered about all the good the new technology would bring, listing off dozens of different potential applications of the limitless power-source, all with a rather fervent insistence, as if he was trying to convince Cain of something he didn't quite believe himself. Cain, of course, saw no problem with the proposals he'd seen so far - _none_ of them were as mad as the AI's so many of Earth's scientific establishments had been eager to create. _That_ was a topic that Cain had carefully not discussed with the others back in the Trinary System. While he and Abel had worked closely together to develop AI for the fight against the Zonders, since the war had finished there had been a backlash against technology in general, and AI specifically. Understandable from the Purple Planeters, who had felt the ravages of the malicious AIs worst, but too easily exploited by the Bio-Priest elites on the Green Planet. Even if the G-Stones used by Earthlings were weak clones of the advanced Strong G-Stones, there would be those who would have screamed had they known of what Cain was allowing to happen.

But the completely alien response to technology the humans held was fascinating, and Cain was more than happy to help them find their own use for his technology. Already their strongest warrior - a Cyborg called Guy Shishio - was able to fuse with a machine called FiGar based upon Galeon, and was even able to fight Cain almost equally. The advancement in two short years of their technology was amazing, and despite all of the negatives of the planet, Cain felt privileged to be involved in their experiments, even if that meant allowing some G-Stones into the hands of weapon specialists.

But Liger, always eager to chatter and apparently unwilling to spend a single moment simply sitting, was already shuffling onto the couch next to Cain, a data-pad showing the human 'e-mail' appearing above his glove.

“I know you’re all bummed about your son. So I asked if we could get some pictures of him. So you could see him grow up. Heck, I’ll even throw in some pictures of my kid, so you know that Mamoru’s life really is great.”

Cain considered, hating at how his heart lifted at even such a small opportunity. “And his human parents would allow that?”

Liger nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yeah. Ask any parent, and they love to show you all the baby pictures they have!" He chuckled as he sent the e-mail. "You gonna love this! Your boy and my girl were probably the sweetest, most innocent things on this planet, and the pictures will just prove it!"

\-------- 

Being on the outside of an argument was a familiar experience for Renais. The scientists and technicians in Bio-Net had argued constantly, all desperate to use their own designs on their few test subjects, while generally ignoring those subjects’ own desires completely. 

The only difference now was the fact that the argument was done completely silently. And, ideally, she would have some say in the outcome. That thought alone kept her from snapping as J and Tomoro bickered over her.

At least, she assumed they were bickering. After her request, J had frozen then said something untranslated to Tomoro. Now he was pacing the room, nervous in motion despite his crossed arms and stiff posture. 

After watching him pace for a good ten minutes, the buzz of the inaudible conversation ringing in her ears, Renais interrupted.

“I want to work. To pay you back for helping me.” Also, to remain near the gate, in case Bio-Net found a way of re-opening it, but she wouldn’t say that in case the Soldato decided to chuck her back through the next portal, the last possible thing she could want.

“I know you need help. I may not be as well-designed as you are, but I am stronger than humans. I should be able to do something.”

She wouldn’t plead, but she would fight to stay. 

“The point is moot, anyways.” Tomoro finally said, in that odd dual-voice. “She can’t leave until winter is over and the road is safe. That’s two of her months away.”

 _I’m sure if we mention to the government that we have an **alien** they’ll spare the expense to come and get her._ She did not understand, but could intuit from the tone.

“Or they’ll think you’ve finally lost it, and come to shut us down when the weather clears. C’mon, J, you know I’m right. And we could use the help.”

J said something aloud, then, that Renais knew was a curse, and threw up his hands.

_Fine. She can -_

“You can stay until spring!” Tomoro spoke over him. “And we can use your help. But not yet! Your system is still recovering, and your brain needs to rest. At least, I think it does. You humans are weird. Let me show you the room!”

J shook his head, a bizarrely human gesture, and after a moment's hesitation Renais followed Tomoro’s glowing directions towards the worker dorms, sparing a last glance back at her savior, silhouetted by green light and face unreadable.

\--------------

The next cycle - a period of time Tomoro defined as being roughly two Earth weeks, split into ten slightly longer days - was strange for Renais. 

First there was the obvious strangeness of learning a whole new culture, a mix of bizarre and alien concepts mixed evenly with bitingly human ones. There were restrooms on the Red Planet, functioning just like those on human space stations. But there was no water, the idea of a shower such a horrifying waste of water that Tomoro couldn't believe her when she first described it. Even on the Green Planet, where water was far more plentiful, only an elite would ever have access to such an amount of unregulated water. (It took her passing out on the third day for the computer to realize that her body in fact needed consistent water to function.)

Yet at the same time, the power and technology on display even in what Tomoro swore was a poorly funded dead end was phenomenal. Barely a step outside and there were temperatures that could melt metal and an atmosphere that would kill an unmodified human in seconds. And, biologically, Greens were no stronger than humans...yet they had conquered the planet from clouds to core. Cyborgs like J could survive the surface and manned giant farms that strained the atmosphere for breathable air which was sent on to giant underground cities or up to space stations...or beyond. Materials from deep underground were similarly exported, mining operations reaching ten times the depths humans had managed. 

Whole new cyborg bodies were at her fingertips, stacked like dolls in storage, alongside incomprehensible tools and weapons Renais knew she would never understand. Yet despite the vast amounts of tech, the outpost was almost completely cut off from its wider world. 

As Tomoro described it, the Red Planet did have a kind of internet, not unlike the fledgling one back on Earth. But with the heavy atmosphere it was near-impossible to send signals through the air. Even the cloud cities had to be hard-wired to the surface to receive transmissions, which they then could beam to space just like human satellites. Add that to most of the population living in underground cities, shielded from their harsh planet by tons of stone, and the Red communications grid was largely constrained by physical distances.

The two main connections between the outpost and the nearest settlement - a full day’s journey away - was a transport chute for small items, primarily the gas canisters the arrays produced and any small replacement parts - and a single cord of ‘net cable that ran atop the chute. Both were protected from the elements by the shallow canal they had been built into, but neither functioned without an influx of energy.

As Tomoro described it, the net cable was really a series of jewel shards connected by tubes of JR liquid, much the same as the GS liquid that now flowed through her veins. When using the system the tubes often had to literally regrow themselves before transmitting, the caustic atmosphere liable to melt them down or cause microfractures between the links.

The chute had no such problems, as it had been designed to withstand Red storms, but J apparently hadn’t considered communication with the wider world important. So they spent most of the year completely cut off from the rest of the planet, Tomoro operating only with what knowledge he had backed up to his own, admittedly quite considerable, J-Jewel memory core.

All of which meant that Renais was stuck with Tomoro doing her repairs until the current period of storms was over. Which was apparently unfortunate, because Tomoro considered her design inadequate and clunky, nothing a true Saldare could ever be proud of.

The little AI spent the power to reconnect to the ‘net just long enough to download everything he could about non-standard organics, an output that drained the whole station’s power for two days and left everything running dimly while J grumbled about the waste. 

Tomoro ignored his master's grumbles and went on to run a battery of tests on Renais, everything that he could come up with based on the limited publicly available data. J worried that someone would realize that they were hosting an alien, and Tomoro swore that he’d hidden their tracks by making it seem as if the AI was researching things out of boredom and a need to burn excess power. Renais could see that this in no way convinced J, but the former warrior seemed content to simply let the AI do what it wished with its new project.

Perhaps the strangest thing for Renais was how that project played out. Back at Bio-Net any upgrade meant physical tests, designed to push her until she broke down or ceased functioning. The cycle was always the same - install, test, upgrade - forcing her through increasingly impossible courses. Failure was met with painful reprimands and further surgeries, success with more anger and further tests. 

She had run marathons for them, across simulated city streets, dodging bullets all the way. She had spent weeks hooked up to white noise machines, electrocuted when she missed the key information whispered three blocks away. She had every bone in herself broken, and seen organs most people wouldn’t even recognize pulled out of her.

And then came Tomoro’s idea of ‘tests’. 

The first day she nearly broke down from the sheer impossibility of it.

“No, no! You shouldn’t be up yet! Sleep more!”

“Tomoro, I’ve been asleep for ten of my hours. If I don’t move I’ll go crazy!”

The AI bobbed on the wall-screen in the tiny little room she had taken. “Is that...possible for humans?”

“Uh. Probably? But it’s more that I don’t like being confined. Or sedated.”

“Oh. Well...I guess you could do these tests in the medical room? But be careful when you walk! I hadn’t realized how dangerous all of this was!”

As she got dressed she tried to understand what Tomoro was so worried about. As far as she could tell, the prosthetic Saldare arm worked fine. She could move her hand, and it seemed to be regulating her heat just fine. Her internals were barely registering 70C - half that of what she usually ran at. And when she walked there was pain, but nothing beyond what she could have expected upon nearly burning her lungs out and going into cardiac arrest twice.

She mentally readied herself for whatever Tomoro thought appropriate for ‘tests', imagining the kind of training the perfectly designed former Soldato would want.

Instead, she found herself loaded down with a sensor-suit; something quite like the Saldare outfit, but turned inside out and covered in tiny flickering readouts. 

She tried not to laugh when she tried it on. But it was hard when she sparkled like a disco ball every time she moved.

Not that Tomoro allowed her to move much. Whatever he had read on the ‘net had scared him badly, and for three days he confined her to the medical bay, working up from the most basic tests he could imagine to things that barely made Renais sweat. 

It began with her sitting on the medical bed, moving her muscles - both new and old - As little as she could, telling Tomoro every sensation as she twitched fingers and toes, trying not to roll her eyes as he apologized for occasionally pricking her to record pain responses. She barely felt the needles, but the sensation was no different in her flesh hand than that of the prosthetic so she was grudgingly impressed. And then Tomoro apologized when she conveyed her surprise, thinking that she might want to be numb to sensations. 

“It’d be great if you could over-ride my extreme pain response - like how you said Soldato’s can simply turn off the pain when it gets too much? - but in general pain is a good thing. It tells you when something’s going wrong.” She explained, and Tomoro’s eyes widened in understanding. “Though if you decide to send me back to Bio-Net, I’d take you up on the offer.”

“We are not sending you back to those...those organics!” Apparently that was the closest to a curse that the AI knew. 

“Until then, do we really need to do these tests? I walked over here just fine.”

Tomoro dithered, visualized by static around his avatar eyeball. “Dr. Petina says that unknown genomes can result in unknown defects. They say not to give prosthesis at all to non-standard hybrids unless overseen by a practiced Saldare technician.”

Privately, Renais thought Tomoro was worrying too much, but she could recognize that it would take several days for her body to recover back to peak condition, and there seemed little harm in allowing the AI to poke at her.

It wasn’t until the third day that a real fault was uncovered. While trying to follow a dot on the screen with her finger, her entire prosthetic seized up, spasming and nearly breaking the screen. Tomoro was half ready to disconnect it right there, but Renais waved him away and waited the few minutes until the hand stopped twitching. Only then did she allow him to examine the arm.

There was no damage. Everything appeared fine. Even a scan showed all the nerve endings still perfectly connected internally, and after an hour there was no sign that the arm had tried to shake itself free of its moorings. 

Tomoro was horrified at her cavalier response to it.

“It’s a pity it's my trigger hand, but I can shoot with my left.”

“But we don’t know what’s wrong! What if it happens again?”

“Then we’ll deal with it. Until you figure it out, I’ll just do detail work with my left hand, and be careful with my right.” 

“You’re not...angry?”

“Disappointed, a bit, but this thing is keeping me alive. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that.”

Then she had to explain the idiom, and by the time they had gone through another whole barrage of tests Tomoro seemed to cautiously accept that the spasm had not caused her any permanent damage. 

Of her enigmatic savior she saw basically nothing. She knew he existed, knew he returned to the base every day, but after that first interrogation he kept to himself. Occasionally she would feel his eyes on her, as she did some basic test Tomoro set up for her, but by the time she looked up he was always gone, the tips of his feathery hair disappearing into his rooms or out the door by the time she turned.

It was mildly frustrating, as her savior was probably the only thing in the compound she was actually challenged by. All the tests Tomoro gave her were easy, and the AI pulled back the moment she had any difficulty, no matter how much she begged for a bit of challenge. She learned half the Red language out of boredom by her second week, keeping her mind busy while she followed the dot on the screen again and again, trying to replicate the failure so Tomoro could be prepared for any accident.

By the third week, half way through her second cycle, she rebelled, demanding to learn how the station worked and how she could help around the place. 

Most of what she could have done - cooking, cleaning, reorganizing the warehouse - was made completely unnecessary with Tomoro overseeing the place. So she dragged one of the weird floor cushions from the main room into the observation room and made Tomoro teach her what the station did.

That, at least, got J out of his room. 

She had been sitting, watching monitors while Tomoro explained what each screen showed, when J appeared, glaring, from his room.

_What are you **doing** , Tomoro? She’ll learn our tactics!_

Renais could only understand half of J’s speech, but she noticed that he spoke aloud more often when she was in the room, and she had heard far less of the buzzing voiceless speech as time went on, as if J had unconsciously shifted his speaking thanks to her presence. Admittedly, his tone usually swung between the Red Planet equivalent of irritated and bored, and now it was the former.

_What tactics, J? She wants to help, and there’s nothing dangerous about the monitors._

_She could be an alien spy, looking for weaknesses in our defenses._

_You don’t actually believe that._ Tomoro sounded peevish, as if J had interrupted his fun. _You just want an excuse to get rid of her!_

_I’m thinking like a soldier. I’m thinking like I should._

_You’re not a soldier any more! And I’m not a warship. We can trust people now._

_What evidence do you have of that?_

_What evidence do you have that she’s evil? Her G-Stone works fine - better when she’s doing something she thinks helps us. She’s a good person, J. Stop looking for a fight._

“Um…”

But J had already left, muttering something about _It's on your head, then._

“Maybe you shouldn’t watch the monitors, then.” Tomoro said, when J was out of earshot. 

“No. I’ll go crazy if I can’t do something. Maybe he’ll believe me if I’m not so useless.” 

Tomoro refrained from passing his judgement on that. He was quickly coming to realize that Renais was just as stubborn as his master, and just as unlikely to budge. But it was nice to have her around, nice to answer her questions and show off the compound, and especially nice to receive her compliments when he showed her something impressive. But J was an organic and not so easily swayed by evidence. He was looking for reasons to be suspicious, simply because no one had cared about them for three years. Now, when someone finally was interested, the former soldier wanted them gone as soon as possible, just because it upset the norm.

Tomoro wouldn’t let that happen. So he eagerly turned back to the monitors and explained in his best French the purpose of everything she asked about.

“This goes to the Ox arrays, showing how much we’ve collected over the past week, and how much we’re collecting now…”

“And the different colors are attached to different gases?”

If he could, Tomoro would have beamed. “Yes! We mostly collect Nitrogen and Oxygen, through the smaller arrays collect everything from Helium to Water vapor.”

“How do you get the oxygen? I thought that it didn’t exist on this planet?”

“The sails break up the Carbon Dioxide atoms into Oxygen and Carbon. Green Planeters need Oxygen to breath; I think it's because there’s so many plants on their planet. They need even more oxygen than you do!” 

“But native Red Planeters don’t need artificial atmosphere?”

“Most of them do. It's just modern Reds that can breath the surface air. Everyone else needs helms.”

Renais examined the replacement helm Tomoro had found for her. J’s helmet - the one he had saved her with - was far too large. The pink creation that Tomoro had found for her fit far better. It went along with a full kit of armor, though Saldara armor looked nothing like the armor that hung in the main room. Instead of heavy metal plate, her armor protected from the elements via a small force field, generated by a chest-plate that connected to her G-Stone. 

The modification to work with GS-Energy was taking Tomoro more time than he anticipated, though Renais suspected the AI to be going slow, lest she take the armor and do something stupid like run off to the portal. No matter how many times she promised she was smarter than that, Tomoro still worried that she wasn’t strong enough to venture outside yet.

Even she had to admit he was probably right. Parts of her body needed to regrow, nerves getting used to the new power and veins getting used G-Liquid rather than blood. Each day she was able to walk longer, to lift heavier equipment and to react faster and with more finness. It would be dangerous for her to go outside as she was, but still it grated on her.

So she asked questions that she knew were stupid, about things that were probably years beyond anything Earth scientists had discovered, and tried not to feel embarrassed when she forgot basic chemistry and had to listen while Tomoro painstakingly explained what atoms were, or nano-fibers, or basic quantum physics.

“You know, I’m not sure that J knows all this.” Tomoro said after another half a week of Renais badgering him about every indicator on the monitors. “He never really asked when we started this, and hasn’t ever asked more.” He was speaking in a pigeon, half in French, half in Red, and Renais could tell he was intentionally baiting J, who was standing just past the monitor room doors, pummeling a set of heavy cushions.

 _I heard that._ He called. _You **know** I grew up on a farm just like this one._

For a moment Renais pictured J with a piece of straw in his mouth, and hid a giggle. 

_Farm boy, huh?_ She called out, and the rhythmic sound of punches faltered. Then she heard the sound of a door slamming. 

“He doesn’t like me much.”

Tomoro sighed. “He thinks you’re dangerous.”

Renais flicked her hair and went back to studying the monitors. “Well, I am. I could destroy this whole compound, if I wanted to.”

“But you wouldn’t!”

“But he doesn’t know that.”

Tomoro managed to make his avatar pout, despite the lack of mouth, and said, “I wish he would trust people more.” He had slipped back into French, which he had completely mastered, and was happy to use to keep J from overhearing their conversations.

“He’s just more obvious about it.” 

The eye swirled to look at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I trust you because you saved me. But if your government asked you to hand me over...well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you obeyed orders, even if you knew I’d be killed. Or torchured." Before Tomoro could protest, she added, “Because that’s your job. You’re soldiers, and you answer to your government. Plenty of people back on my world would do the same, the instant they saw an alien. And they wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.” She shrugged. “People look after their own interests. You can’t expect different. The uglier the situation, the more they’re going to protect what they care about. You care about J, and your planet. If I ever get in the way of that, I bet you’d shoot me without remorse.”

“That’s...that’s a horrible thing to think!”

“Doesn’t make it not true. But you’re being nice to me now, and I’m gonna try my hardest not to get you in a situation where you’d need to make that choice. If just because I’d never win.”

Then she turned back to the monitors and said, “That there, it means there’s a storm coming.”

Tomoro’s mind swung back to the monitors while the rest of the sweet AI revolted against the cruel world Renais seemed to believe in. “Uh - 90% chance, moving fast, yes. I guess I’ll close the weak arrays.”

Barely a moment later the storm hit, slamming the compound with a deafening howl and the lights flickered as the windmills cutout. 

But Renais was still watching the monitors, as array after array was closing up, starting before even she had called out, Tomoro acting on instinct when one of his sub-routines noticed the storm.

“Can I ask you something? Why is there a monitor room at all? You do a better job that J or I could. Why not leave the warnings and predictions to you, and let the workers do the manual labor?”

Tomoro pulled his mind away from worrying about his charges and said, “You’re from a different world. You let AIs have bodies and everything. But the Zonders...They were rogue AIs, and they nearly destroyed the solar system. No one trusts things like me. Certainly not to protect a station of organics. If the main station found out about how much I do, they might shut us down for endangering the city.”

“You could do just a much bad stuff as I could, huh?”

“More.” the Ai said, miserably. “I could tamper with the canisters, and send toxic gases to the cities. That’s what they’re afraid of. Stuff like that happened during the war. Or I could kill all of you by flooding the compound, or locking the door during an acid storm, or...well, a lot of things.”

“But none of those would work against J.”

Tomoro paused, as if he’d never considered that fact. “...no, it wouldn’t J’s a native. And he fought in the war. So...Even if I went crazy, he’d be okay!” The little AI sounded so happy about this that Renais carefully didn’t think to hard about what would happen to her if the AI went insane. 

But Tomoro was already thinking on it. “And even if J doesn’t like company, he’d still save you. He likes helping people. Just don't let him know I said that!”


	5. Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renais begins to learn about the technology of the Red Planet, and Cain finds himself nervous about something silly.

"You're distracted."

Cain refocused on the training exercise before him. Two robots - the yellow Chinese one and the Blue Japanese one - were battling back and forth within the wide field created by the Dividing Driver. GaoGar and FiGar watched from the sidelines, waiting their turn but ready to rush in if anything went wrong.

To the left of Cain's screen a face appeared - the Cyborg Guy, one of the few humans that the Trinary Leader felt he truly connected with. The young man reminded him much of himself in his younger days, though without the worry and stress that weighed him down even now. Frankly, he was envious of the boy's easy smiles and instantaneous rapport with others. 

"I'm thinking of my son." 

"Ah. Liger mentioned he had some pictures for you."

"Yes. But...I worry that they will mean little to me. Human culture...it is so different from my own. How will I be able to tell if my boy was treated well, given good opportunities, and has excelled in this world?" 

Guy shook his head ruefully. "Its usually pretty obvious. I'm sure Liger will explain what's going on in the pictures."

Cain looked back to the battlefield, clearly uncomfortable. "Perhaps. But while Liger is a good friend..."

"You're not sure about his understanding of children?" Cain's silence was answer enough. "Tell you what. Mikoto and I will stop by later. If you've got any questions, you can ask us too."

"Thank you. That would be...appreciated."

\--------------------

It was another week before Renais was able to convince Tomoro to teach her about the facilities outside the compound, and how she could help with their work. By then she had recovered enough to easily stay awake for a full Red day, and keep active throughout it. Perhaps she was not as strong as she had been during her training at Bio-Net, but there was no way to test it, and Tomoro swore that the G-Stone in her arm would give her enough power to far out-perform her earlier self, should a crisis ever arrive.

Not that it did. Tomoro and J moved as a perfect team, three years of practice meaning that even the winter winds did not unduly challenge the pair when caring for the arrays. J went out every day, making minor repairs, and Tomoro tried his best to anticipate any dangers and mostly succeeded. 

But that wasn’t enough for Renais. She wanted to do something to help, and using her need to pay back the power they’d invested in her repair as an excuse, she bullied Tomoro into showing her the ropes for more than just the monitor room.

That was where J found her, a Earth month after arriving on the Red Planet; spread out on the floor of the common room with the lights turned up near to blinding as she examined the fine mesh of a sample sail.

“So these are nanofibers?” Her Red had gotten better, though she was far from fluent and could barely read the pan-system script that all the instruction manuals were written in. 

“Yes!” Tomoro chirped back. “The most common damage we need to repair are tears to the sails. Each sail fiber is tuned to a specific gas - the one you’re looking at right now is a discontinued Ox fiber, so you don't need to worry about damaging it. We never even strung it up before they sent us the replacements.”

“Why doesn’t it work?” She ran the material through her fingers, marveling at the give and feel of the fabric. The mesh was woven precisely, and when charged would collect only a specific gaseous compound, catching then transporting the atoms through the precisely sized fiber tubes, while letting the rest of the wind pass right through. 

“The charge was off. It collected carbon, not oxygen, but the tubes were too small and clogged, making the whole run useless.” 

“We test everything before we run it up.” J said, and Renais glanced over her shoulder at him, as if surprised that he actually spoke. “We knew long before Central Management that the fabric was useless.”

Tomoro, suspended from the ceiling by a clear pane and slightly hidden by readouts, beamed at his master. “I found a use for it, though! It's perfect for teaching!”

And it was true. The useless fabric still had come with the required repair equipment, and Tomoro proceeded to show the Earthling woman how easy the fabric could tear, and how to repair it when it did. 

“First identify the damage…” Renais repeated as she worked, a day later, brushing the ever-present grit off the sail with a clean glove. Tomoro had torn the sail in a half dozen places, tiny micro-tears to jagged rips that would be almost impossible to fix in the strong surface winds. That was one of the reasons daily maintenance was necessary; it was easy for minor tears to grow quickly and risk destroying the whole array when the sail finally broke free.

“Then choose the correct canister…” This was the most difficult part for Renais, though Tomoro didn't understand why. Each canister was labeled with its element name and colored accordingly. But in the harsh orange light of the Red Planet, the subtle differences in hue disappeared to Renais’s human eyes, and the Trinary System script was almost impossible for her to read, spelled out in hexagonal glyphs that looked more like fractals than meaningful symbols. 

But with the clear light of the compound she could choose the correct canister without undue difficulty, matching the burnt umber of the can to the swath of color Tomoro had thrown up on one of the screens, mimicking the paint that would ring the array’s central pole. 

“Don’t rattle the canister…” The cans looked almost exactly like spray-paint to her, the same colored cap, same nozzle, same application method: point, depress, and release a fine mist. But Tomoro had explained that shaking the can could damage the nano-fibers and cause weakness in the bond. Still, it was tempting, so she had incorporated it into her checklist.

“Hold the edges close together…” The nano-fibers really were amazing; as long as she held the fabric tight the fibers would instantly stitch the tear back together. The difficulty was juggling the both the fabric and the can; she was using her knees too much on the floor to hold everything tight and she knew it. How J managed to do this half way up a pole in the hurricane-force winds outside, she had no idea. 

“Depress nozzle, wait three seconds then move on…” Still, watching the tears knit back together before her eyes was quite satisfying. it had been a long time since she had _fixed_ anything, and the reward was knowing that she had left the place a bit better than when she found it; something that had been impossible to dream of back at BioNet.

“Make sure the whole tear is covered…” Again, something easier in the harsh light of the compound than outside under the flickering sky.

“Then step back and examine the fix.” Or lean back, if one was suspended from a pole. Renais looked at her initial handiwork, then fixed the other tears as fast as she could, hoping to impress the completely stoic Soldato who watched her from the monitor room. 

Only after she capped the can and scooted away from the sail did Tomoro electrify it, which she would do manually outside, assuming the finicky AI found no faults in her repair. 

The whole sail hummed, pitched higher than a normal human could sense but which Renais’s modified ears could easily catch. It was the same hum she sometimes caught at the edge of her hearing, when the winds paused for a brief moment and the arrays were left to themselves. She guessed that each sail had its own frequency, subtly different based upon its charge, which was why there were different pitches weaving together in the rare silences.

Since Tomoro and J were not aware of her extra abilities, she had remained quiet about them, not mentioning that she could hear everything in the compound, from the pad of J’s footsteps in his armor, to the hum of energy from behind the walls, to the clatter of the various mechanical devices - some of which were clearly broken from the way they whined with the press of metal on metal. 

There was no reason to hide this power, but Renais had learned to always keep something back from her captors, and this hidden skill might help convince them to let her stay, despite not being able to compare physically to the big Soldato. Plus, she suspected that a man a private as J would feel uncomfortable with another easily able to track his movements, though in general he moved so silently that Renais had to listen close to track him down. Even now, his internals were almost impossible to hear, purring quietly in his chest and arm while he watched Tomoro work.

The sail-hum increased, slightly off-key, and for a moment it floated, its charge repelling it from the cold floor and doing its best to fulfill its purpose. J walked around it, clearly inspecting her work, though Renais could tell there were no tears left; at least not any that the human eye could see. 

“You have a steady hand.” He finally said, and that was it; the only opinion he would give her. Then he left, leaving Tomoro to correct a few minor errors, places where her patches could be straighter, despite the fact that the seams were barely visible even to the AI’s senses. 

Only when J was out of earshot did she ask, “Is this good enough? Can I help now?”

Tomoro beeped to himself. “Well...he doesn’t mind you working on the sails. And he won’t stop you if you want to go out. I’m the one who’s worried.” Then the AI’s voice pitched lower and he mimicked J’s aloof speech., “She knows the dangers. If she wishes to get herself killed, then that is her choice.” The image on the screen shook back and forth, the same motion for Red Planeter’s as Earthlings: disappointed exasperation. “But I care. And I don’t want you straining yourself or getting hurt!”

She began deconstructing the sail, taking down the repaired fabric and disassembling the pole it was attached to. “I’m not going to push myself, Toe. And we’ll be in contact the entire time l’m out there.”

“Yes, but…”

“Don’t worry so much. I’m stronger than you think.”

There was a snort from behind her, J having returned in his training outfit, clearly not believing her assertion of her strengths. The thought rankled, but Renais hid her irritation. There seemed to be no way to prove her skills to the soldier - at least no way that would keep him an ally. She certainly couldn’t fight him on equal ground, not with the speed he showed on the mat and the violent power in each of his strikes.

There had to be another way…

She thought of this as she stowed the tools and went on to training on more mechanical repairs, the problem working through her mind as her eyes scanned machines a hundred years more advanced than Earth’s own.

\---------------

“How do these work again?” Renais weighed the crystal in her hand, feeling the odd resistance to her motion. Another day, another new set of instructions.

“Entangled Crystals. They were proto-types to the G-Stones. Now we mostly use them in coolant systems.”

Tomoro chirped.

Renais’s brow creased. The crystal in her hand was freezing cold, absorbing all heat from its surroundings. “So its ‘partner’ is some place really cold?”

“Probably used for asteroid mining. They use our heat to bore out the center of ice meteors, then tow them into orbit around the Green and Red planets. The two on your right are what they look like normally. Those are used in monitoring, mostly for the more distant relays.”

He was speaking of the communication and transport relays between the farm and the outside world, which always needed more power for repairs.

“Hmm.” Renais picked up the two smaller crystals, which both warmed to cherry red at her touch. 

At the moment Tomoro was teaching her how to use the small, hand-held repair tools while also showing her all the common array machinery the farm needed to replace. The coolant systems were simple, and Renais had already mastered the sails - or at least mastered as much as she could from inside the compound. But there were other devices - a high-pressure grommeter that could bite through a hand’s worth of steel to relieve internal pressure, vacuums with suction so powerful as to be able to bend metal back into shape, a device that could lay down thin sheets of metal just as easily as the spray-cans put out nano-fibers...dozens and dozens of such machines which were essential to the daily maintenance of the farm. With the hellish temperatures, punishing environment, and caustic atmosphere, all of them were needed constantly. 

Renais placed the crystals aside and picked up the grommeter, which looked - and functioned - more like a gun than any other device she’d yet come across in the compound. It probably should have made her sick at how comfortable it felt in her hand, how easy her finger found the trigger and the detached way she calculated the recoil and range with a few test punctures. 

Instead, she was distracted by a sharp pain in her head, forcing her to drop the device and swear. A moment later, Tomoro followed suit, yelling for J as a sudden storm hit, the ferocity slamming into the canyon the compound was housed in and making the lights flicker.

Renais only had to glance at the monitors to see Tomoro already closing the arrays, each demagnetizing and retracting, one after another, the AI moving faster than any human could manage. Even then she saw at least two large tears opening on the sails, as the storm threw debris right through them, its strength far greater than any storm she had yet seen.

“J! Ox-29 isn’t closing!” The AI shouted a moment later. J was already suiting up, but at that he dropped his chest-piece and bolted, pausing only long enough to pick up the emergency repair kit by the door and then overriding the airlock to dash into the storm.

Even sheltered by the canyon, the wind was strong enough from the open door to knock Renais back several feet, scattering her tools across the floor and flooding the compound with noxious atmosphere. But neither J or Tomoro cared. 29 was one of their largest and oldest arrays, alone collecting enough Oxygen to allow a small city to breath. To let it be damaged would endanger the lives of thousands of Red Planeters. A few scratches upon the compound's screens was worth it to save the machine. 

Luckily, Ox-29 was one of the closer arrays, barely over the canyon edge. As J climbed the walls, Renais dashed to the monitor room, knowing there was little she could do to help but needing to watch anyways. The wind was so strong that J’s talons left gouges in solid stone as he fought his way over the ridge and onto the plateau.

It was impressive to watch him work. The storm was a maelstrom, not the simple prevailing winds of a normal day. Even the closed arrays shook and bent in the wind, flexibility their only protection against being snapped at the base. Those with sails still extended wouldn’t last long. The unclosed sails spun in their moorings, whipping back and forth, their poles shrieking as their two ends pulled and twisted in different directions. Ox-29’s mast screamed as the huge sails pulled at it. And J forced himself towards it, despite its crazed motion.

Renais winced as he caught the first pole. The sound of the impact couldn’t be heard over the howling wind - even with her ears - but his face contorted in pain, and that alone was enough to show just how much it hurt. His heels dug into the ground as he fought the wind, the sail trying to either tear itself from his hands or force him back, near jerking his arms from his sockets as he shoved the sail along its tracks until he found the junction.

“Tomoro!” The com crackled, and the AI answered immediately, sending the signal to reel in the first half of the sail. Still, J needed to push the pole in the rest of the way, step by laborious step, each gust of wind threatening to tear the sail from his hands or snap the moorings completely.

Ox-29 was the size of a city block, and Renais swore she could feel the strain of each step J took to push the sail back and finally secure it to the post. Then he had to force his way back out again, faster this time, and repeat it for the second sail, which whipped all the faster without its sibling to counterbalance it.

It promptly hit him in the face.

That was loud enough to hear, even down in the canyon. He was instantly thrown away. But his reflexes were fast, so instead of being thrown halfway across the plateau one hand lashed out and grasped the pole just as the wind caught him, talons tearing into the delicate fabric and denting the metal as he held on, the rest of his body flailing against the winds as the sail whipped back and forth. A second hand went to hold on below the first, and that gave him barely enough leverage to pull himself straight, holding his feet just off the ground until he had caught his breath enough to take control again.

The sail rod bent when he touched down and slowed it. The whole structure of Ox-29 bent with it, warnings lighting up the monitors as the sail tried to follow the wind, rather than the man forcing it back. But step by step he pushed it back to its mast, manually tying it down when the automatic systems did not respond to Tomoro’s command.

Then he had to walk back, against the mad winds, onto the smaller arrays, some of which were bending just as dangerously, an manually collapse three more before finally being able to return to the compound, a full hour later.

This time, Renais had a hand over her eyes when Tomoro opened the door, and stood by to help however she could. She didn’t flinch at the burning air, and held fast against the wind as it rushed through the compound again. 

But J simply walked straight past her, as if she wasn’t there.

\------------------

The monitors hadn’t shown just how filthy he was, covered in rail grease and sand and the sticky pink runoff from damaged power lines. Nor had it shown how his hands shook, and every step he took was heavy, as if he was fighting to just keep moving.

First the belt hit the floor, then various pieces of armor. Renais winced at the welts revealed at the edges of said armor, where the wind had tried to rip it from his body and blown sand into every seam in the metal. Green bruises were swelling beneath his helmet, obvious when it also hit the ground, and Renais saw his crest come down in the first time in weeks. Streaks of dirt and grease ran through the normally pristine plumage.

The girl yelped and flushed, though, when he started stripping off his under-suit. It was just as badly treated as the rest of him, the blasting sands having torn right through it in several places, leaving rips wide enough to reveal the pale skin beneath it. Rather than go to the trouble of taking it off properly, J expedited the process by simply ripping the fabric off of himself, thin material no match for the talons on his gauntlets. First the sleeves came off, ripping at the elbows rather than going over the metal bracers. Then the chest, in one wide motion, then the legs, which was were Renais forced her gaze away.

Tomoro was hard at work, too, the common room shifting beneath their feet, normal cushions raised and pushed aside, revealing first a sitting area around a table, then removing the table covering and revealing a shallow basin filled with…

“More sand?”

For the first time, J seemed to register her presence, glancing over a shoulder, but doing nothing more before collapsing face-first into the fine white sand. A cloud was thrown up as he hit it, and for a moment he lay there, stretched out with all the storm damage clear to see, welts and bruises and acid burns peppering his slim torso and waist, far enough down that Renais told herself to look away again, though apparently the man himself had absolutely no modesty at all.

Still…”Can I...get you anything?”

He didn’t respond, but he did groan and sit up, shifting until the sand covered up to his waist and Renais stopped needing to look elsewhere. 

“I’ll...uh...get Tommoro to clean your armor.”

She reached out to the first piece, only to be quickly stopped. “Leave it.” He said, his tone allowing no argument, even as he closed his eyes and leaned back on the lip of the basin. His brow was twisted and his lips grimaced each time he moved.

She left the armor where it lay, but picked up everything else, both his tools and hers, trying to do at least something useful. 

It took until he began cleaning for her to realize that the basin was a Red version of a bath. Later Tomoro explained that the sand was sanitized and heated from below. All one needed to do to clean was scrub the sand against the skin, as J proceeded to do when he had gotten enough of his energy back to move. Renais watched from the corner of her eye as he scrubbed at the grease on his face and neck, discarding the dirty sand to the side in some kind of receptacle and then going back to scrub at his arms and chest. His feathers took the most time, and she had to bite her lip to keep from chuckling at the way he preened and fluffed them, so like a bird and so little like a mann. 

She left before he finished, leaving him to his privacy and returning the tools to their appropriate places before returning to her room.

“You don’t have to leave.” Tommoro said.

“It’s rude to watch someone bathing.” She explained, the tension leaking into her voice more from being unable to help more than actual embarrassment. Though she certainly had learned a few things about Red anatomy…

“It is? Reds bathe together all the time. That’s why the bath is in the main room. That way everyone can use it at once!” 

“Remember what said about humans being weird about nudity?”

The AI yelped, and quickly went to apologize, while also informing J that he should use his private bath next time.

The Soldato was not swayed. Hip-deep into the sand and the aches only slowly easing out, he snorted at Tomoro’s suggestion.

“I am not changing my habits for one person. Especially a useless one.”

Maybe he wouldn’t have said it aloud if he had known that Renais could hear him, all the way back in her room, shoving the grommet-gun and crystals into a hidden compartment beneath her bed. Then again, if he said it aloud at all, he probably didn’t care. 

\-------------------------------------------

The storm dissipated as fast as it had come, a total anomaly in the weather patterns Tomoro had predicted. 

“The Floating Cities are probably testing a new weapon.” J guessed, when Tomoro dithered about it, worrying over his failure. 

“They could have warned us!” The AI complained, its avatar squeezing into a pout.

The Soldato snorted, the bruises having only started to fade from his face three days after the storm. “They probably don’t even know we’re down here. Why care about every little farm when they’ve got History to make?” His tone indicated just how little he respected that decision, even as he was powerless to do anything about it.

“Little farms like ours are the only reason they can breath and do their fancy work.”

“You should go on strike.” 

J and Tomro glanced to Renais, where she was sitting at the monitors, her daily ration of water held in her hands, watching the arrays dance in the winds and hiding a smile at the thought of a battalion of striking Soldatos. 

“What is ‘strike’?” Tomoro asked.

“Its common on Earth - when a company is disrespecting its workers, they can choose to stop working in protest until the situation is remedied.” 

J sneered. “What arrogance. How can a lesser worker know what is best for this ‘company’? They should trust their superiors, and if they are dissatisfied work harder to prove themselves.”

Renais’s brow skyrocketed upwards. “Oh? And why should they trust their superiors?”

“If they have been given a position of power, they clearly must have the skills required. Honor dictates that they care for those under their command, and in return they are given loyalty. That is the way of it.”

“And that ‘honor’ is why you’re out here, in the middle of nowhere, getting bombed by idiots on clouds?” She smirked, and J glared at her.

“Do not speak of things you do not understand.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Then let me do something. Help with repairs. I know you need it, after that storm.”

“When Tomoro has your uniform ready, I’ll be happy to watch you make a fool of yourself.”

They both glanced at Tomoro’s screen, where the AI flushed and promised to almost be finished. 

“Before the next storm, I promise!”

\------------------- 

The uniform wasn’t ready by the next storm, though that was no fault of Tomoro’s. The AI and Soldato had their hands full with repairs to the arrays, but Tomoro tried to expedite the process as much as possible, reinforcing the old Saldare uniforms as much as he could.

But almost exactly a week after the first devastating storm, a second hit, equally unexpected. One minute normal, hundred mile an hour winds, the next the pressure dropped and there was chaos.

Renais woke in her bunk, headache so strong as to be excruciating, everything in her body warning danger. 

The second time around, she was able to confirm the source. The pain radiated from her G-Stone, and that could only mean one thing. As J and Tomorro dashed to the arrays once again, she quietly disappeared. Neither noticed she was gone.


	6. Innocence and Cruelty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Liger reminisces about the perfect daughter he barely, J must find the far more complex woman he vastly underestimated.

Pictures were spread out on every inch of the conference room table, both digital and physical - the former shown on the table's interactive surface, the latter spread out on top, filling in gaps or adding extra photos that had not been deemed worthy of digitization. 

The sheer volume of photos shocked Cain. Yes, they were flat, static things that held no psychic residue from those pictured. But he doubted a dedicated royal biographer could have captured even half of the images on the table before him.

"It makes sense, y'know?" Liger said when asked. "The Amami's never thought they would have children. They probably took pictures every day just to remind themselves of their luck." 

And it was true there were dozens upon dozens of Latio as an infant, big, bright smile upon his face with his two adopted parents engaged in various activities around him, the same broad smiles on their faces. Envy curled in Cain's gut at the sight. He had few images of his own from his childhood, and he never looked so happy, with or without his parents by his side. There had been too much responsibility - always to be the best, to lead others by his example, to never falter and to always take the higher ground.

But here, all around him, were images of his boy being - well - _normal_. Liger pointed out the dirt and bruises from a tumble down some kind of play set, Latio looking fierce and his parents looking proud that 'he didn't cry'. Another showed an infant Latio throwing mashed food at the camera, his adopted mother's apron splattered with their previous attempts, followed by another photo proclaiming "he likes it!" along with an image of a jar of orange puree...which Liger pointed out being present in just about every other picture of the Amami's feeding their boy. In their simple, human way the Amami's had tried to do their best for Latio. There were pictures from doctor's visits (so completely alien in their look that Liger once again had to explain) and sports events (in which no one flew, but Latio smile and that seemed to be good enough). It wasn't perfect - there were tears and broken plates and guilty looks over cooking disasters. Latio didn't seem to stand out from the other children occasionally pictured - he wasn't tall, or a leader of his sports team, or brilliant in his school. But those other children seemed to like him greatly, and after the first pictures of school many of the children stayed the same, year after year, showing the boy gaining fast friends even as he demonstrated no outstanding abilities to explain it.

Liger looked confused when Cain pointed this out.

"What do you mean, why does he have friends? He's a kid. He doesn't have to be special to 'earn' friendship!"

"But...as a Royal, those allowed around him should be highly controlled."

"Cain, you're not getting it. He's _not_ a Royal here. His parents raised him totally normal. And even if they knew he was special, they're the kind of people who wouldn't let that stop their boy from having friends. That messes a kid up, y'know. Like my girl..." He sighed, and sent a new set of pictures to the table.

"I never really thought about it at the time. I was always traveling for work, and my wife...she had her own reasons for always moving. A new city every year, it sometimes seemed. We never thought how lonely that must have made Renais. You look at your boy, and he has friends who are always there for him. But Renais...every new city she had to start over." 

Cain looked over the pictures, and understood what Liger was saying. The quiet blond girl in the pictures seemed...incomplete somehow. She smiled wide in the pictures, but it never seemed to reach her eyes, and while there were plenty of pictures taken at school gatherings and events, there were never familiar faces in the background. Only those deep blue eyes and half-smile remained the same.

"She was such a sweet child." Liger said, fingering one of the pictures, in which the blond girl sat next to her mother, expressions almost identical in unreadability. "So quiet. Never once called attention to herself. Never made a scene. Never caused trouble."

"The sort of person who would never hurt anyone."

\------------------------------- 

“Damn the girl! Where is she when I need her?” J slammed into the doors, the storm nearly throwing him half across the room when Tomoro finally opened them. He discarded another broken tool - the second welder that had been snapped by the wind. 

This storm was not abating as the last one had. And while the repairs they had made the first time held, the smaller arrays were suffering from the mad winds, panels being ripped off and exposing their delicate innards to the punishing gale, making repair still necessary and twice as hard as it normally was. Half a dozen tools had been ripped out of J’s hands so far, and others had broken or become non-functional in the erratic wind. 

For once, there was a use for the girl. She could have brought replacement parts from storage, drastically lessening the time it took him to return to the plateau.

“She’s in her rooms. I tried to wake her, but she’s not responding.” Tomoro sounded apologetic.

J paused halfway to the storage wing. It was easy to dismiss the girl, irritating and unhelpful as she was. But…

His eyes narrowed, and he hurried to the barracks, Tomoro dogging his steps with warnings.

“You really shouldn’t bother her. Humans are very strange about their privacy…”

As usual, the kitchen area was powered down, and there was no light beneath the door of the room the girl had taken for her own. Of course, she had chosen one of the largest private rooms in the compound, second only to J’s own, separated from the rest of the barracks and with its own desk and sleeping-pallet built into the rock itself. J found the set-up claustrophobic, but apparently the girl didn’t care that she slept completely surrounded by layers upon layers of rock. 

J barely needed to walk into her room to confirm what he’d suspected. Still, he walked over to the bed and moved aside the mass of fabric she slept beneath, uncovering a bright red crystal, perfectly matching her heat signature.

“She’s not here, Tomoro.”

“That’s not possible. Renais has remained in her room since last night.” 

“Really? When was the last time she spoke to you?”

“When she asked me to cycle the airlocks this morning. But that...doesn’t make sense...” 

As Tomoro spoke, his speech became garbled, and J swore. AIs didn’t deal well with contradictions. Usually Tomoro was resilient to apparent paradox, but when he was emotionally compromised - for example worried about someone he believed to be a friend - or overworked - such as by an unexpected storm - errors could work their way into his programming.

He spoke quickly over the static. “Tomoro. The girl - Renais - is not in her room. She has not been in her room for...probably since the storm started. Ignore the heat signature. She used an entangled crystal to fool your sensors.”

The garbled hissing faded and Tomoro blinked. “Oh. But...why did she ask for an airlock cycle?”

J’s expression darkened. “Do you have a recording of that?” Then, before Tomoro could answer. “Play it back.”

The AI's screen turned to a video feed. Tomoro rarely consciously examined the various readings that came from the base - leaving his sub-routines to deal with minor things. With the majority of him distracted by assisting J with the storm, it was a subroutine that Renais had spoken to that morning. 

Watching the video, it was obvious what she had done. The red-tinted lenses watched the girl, helmet in her hand and the half-finished armor tugged over her clothes, casually speak to the door, and slip through as the cleaning cycle ran its course. 

Tomoro ran the recording backwards, showing her exiting her room and pulling the helmet from the stand it rested on beside the door. She moved fast, but in a way that did not appear hurried so as to not trigger Tomoro’s notice. Speaking to him, she had sounded completely normal.

Yet in perhaps three minutes, from the moment she emerged from her room, suited up and ready to fight the wind, she was gone.

And, slung over her back, apparently just as necessary as the ability to breath, was a modified puncture-gun.

“Find her, Tomoro. Find her _now_.”

\---------------------------------------- 

It took her four hours, Earth time, to make it back to her original location. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to track. Just follow the ache in her arm, as if boiling lead was being fed into her veins, and when the pain got worse, she was going in the right direction.

Navigating was just as hard as she suspected. There were no shields on her armor, so she had to face the winds head-on, no protection. She’d seen the way J had moved in the wind, effortlessly adapting to changes, and tried her best to mimic it, but only ever partially succeeded. She was walking through a hurricane, and only luck and the desolate wasteland prevented her from being blown over by hurled debris. 

She tried to stay out of the canyons as much as possible for that reason: while the winds were heavier on the surface, the canyons had accumulated more sand and rocks, all of which were being thrown up by the rushing winds. Once or twice she was hit by small objects, and several more times she had to take a hit that would have otherwise damaged the machine on her back. Still, she had to keep going. 

Four hours, and she confirmed what she’d suspected. There was a huge, ugly storm-cloud hanging above one of the canyons that was part of the maze out past the plateau. Crackling purple energy emerged from it and discharged in the sky, stirring up more winds every time it released. 

That was surely her destination.

\---------------------------------- 

“I can’t find her! Something is interfering with my readings!” 

“...just like the day we found her.”

Tomoro paused and did a quick comparison. “Yes! Exactly like that.”

But J was already on the move, “Do you remember the original canyon we found her in?” 

“...yes, I’ve got it marked down.”

“Direct me to it. I’m going after her.”

\--------------------------------- 

He found her an hour later, exactly where he’d expected her to be.

Or...close. Rather than finding her at the source of the storm, either trying to get through a new portal or consorting with whoever had created it...he found her on an outcropping above the canyon, completely hidden from whoever was below.

That alone made him slow his approach. The girl was clearly worse for wear - her outfit torn and blood running from scrapes on her knees and elbows. But she held the stolen puncture-gun rock steady in her hands, despite the mad winds, her eyes never moving from whatever was hidden by the canyon. There was no way to tell how long she had been there, holding that exact position.

The rules for command in the Red military were clear on how to deal with such a situation. The girl had blatantly lied and disobeyed his orders. She should be pulled back to base, jailed, and punished for her disobedience, never mind the wider situation.

But J wasn’t a soldier anymore. And though he was furious with her for leaving the compound, he also needed to know _why_ she had acted as she did.

So instead of simply striding over and pulling her out from her cover, he crouched and tried to be as silent as possible as he made his way to her position, the roaring winds coming to his aid and silencing his approach.

At least, he thought they had, but he was a good two meters out from her location when she stiffened and her beak-helm snapped to him. 

There was no way she could have heard him, based on what Tomoro knew of her abilities. But, given the cleverness she’d used to hide her escape, it was clear that they both had vastly underestimated her.

Beneath the helmet, her eyes were wide. One hand still held the gun in place, another had gone to a crude knife, made from a broken shard of metal, clearly sharpened by hand. 

When J didn’t move, she seemed to accept his presence and motioned with the knife for him to come join her, turning back to her watch as soon as he began to move.

When he was at her side, hidden beneath the same rock outcropping, she jerked her chin towards what she was looking at. It was clear that whatever was causing the storm was just below the edge of the canyon. A quick look showed him what he’d expected, given the speed at which the girl had rushed out: An ES Window, a purple hole in reality, warping everything around it.

At a glance, he could tell that this window was nowhere near as refined as those used on Red ships. That was the cause of the storm - the unstable window was twisting and turning, clearly trying to dissolve but held fast by two metal towers that had been placed on the canyon floor. 

As his eyes continued down, he took in the rest of the situation. Dozens of tubes and wires ran from the Window, linking the Red Planet to wherever the Window had originated - presumably Earth, given the girl’s reaction. All the cables were connected to boxes strewn along the canyon floor, none recognizable to J, though he could feel the buzz of electromagnetic energy in his skull, even through the chaos kicked up by the storm. 

Two heavily suited creatures - presumably human - oversaw the machines, connected just as everything else with cords running to the Window. J's helmet picked up their radio chatter, but it was all in an unfamiliar language, similar seeming to the girl’s, but different enough that he couldn’t catch the meaning of any words.

She did, however, and her grim expression indicated that it wasn’t good. Her hand clenched on the gun, and for a moment she looked away.

But then she turned to him and spoke, on a private channel that he had thought only Tomoro knew, 

“I will explain everything later. Will you let me handle this?” 

J’s eyes narrowed but he nodded, once.

He had assumed that she would hail the humans. Or attempt to communicate in some way.

Instead she fired exactly four shots.

One, cutting the cord tying the humans to their world.  
Two, destroying the control panel on the Window housing.  
Three, a single shot to the back of one of the humans' heads.  
Four, a shot across the final human’s helmet, shattering it open to the elements.

Then she lowered the gun, as if that was the end of it. 

And she seemed to be right. The ES Window collapsed with a dull explosion a moment later, the machine she’d shot apparently the only thing keeping it even close to stable. The outcropping easily protected them from the blast, though the canyon floor was not so lucky. The machines and the people would certainly have felt the worst of the impact.

The girl seemed certain enough of no resistance when she stood a moment later. She climbed down into the canyon without a second thought and J followed a moment later, landing on gritty sand surrounded by a cacophony of screaming machines. She was already at work: a good kick to the Window frame sent both posts crashing to the ground, snapping them at the base and leaving sparking wires in their wake. Most of the machines were already beginning to lose power, the blast opening their innards up to the punishing Red atmosphere. 

The humans - and J confirmed they were humans when he followed Renais to their remains - were clearly no threat. Their over-engineered suits had been designed to withstand the Red atmosphere, not outright attack. One had died instantly. The other…

Renais had crouched down by the other, who was gasping, writhing in agony as the atmosphere ate away at him from the inside. She removed her helmet, apparently not caring about the damage it did to her, and spoke. With the dissipating winds, he would have been able to hear her words, which J recorded to have Tommorro translate later. 

“Dr. Franz. Do you remember me?”

The man’s red eyes focused on her, and it spoke to something that his reaction was to scream louder and whimper.

“i want you to know this isn’t for me. It’s for everyone who came before me. Your death is going to be just as agonizing as the ones you inflicted upon them. Enjoy your justice, bastard.”

Then she stood, and returned to J’s side. The remainder of their conversations was back-lit by the man’s screams, blubbering coughs, and finally utter silence. The girl didn’t once look at him, even as he screamed out her name and begged for mercy.

“These were the people who captured you.” J said.

Renais affixed the helmet back on her head and nodded. “BioNet, yes. I suspected they might find another power-source for their wormhole. I didn’t expect them to do it so fast. The last storm must have been their test run and this time…” She trailed off, looking as he crossed his arms and loomed over her. 

“That is why you wished to stay. To be close to the Window.”

“To protect you from them!” J snorted, but she barreled on. “And to protect Earth from this.” She waved a hand, indicating the whole Red planet. “I listened in on them. They’re planning on collecting Red atmosphere and processing it into chemical weapons. If they get their hands on any of your technology, no matter how minor, who knows what they’ll do.”

“So you lied to me and Tomoro, just to help your own world.”

“I did not lie. I told you the truth, as much of it as I knew at the time. But now I have an opportunity to fight back against them, and I’m not going to give that up.”

“Why not just take more of my weapons and fix the problem at the source?” 

She threw her hands up. “I’m not stupid. Maybe you could do that, but behind that portal is a highly fortified compound with a small army of guards with guns. They probably have fail-safe to blow the portal and everyone around it to space if we so much as try to get through.”

She paused then raised a single finger. 

“But. If you let me stay, we can keep this up. The Red Planet is too tempting a target for them. They’ll keep wasting resources to make the portal work. Keep sending teams through. As long as we remain hidden, we can siphon off resources that they might otherwise spend on making worse weaponry back on Earth while forestalling a full scale invasion that might endanger your people.”

She looked to him, as if her argument was in any way convincing, and not a dishonorable mess of a plan.

But J was not a soldier any more. He hadn’t had a good fight in over two years. Watching the girl line up her shots had stirred a burning emotion in his gut: Envy. It had been too long since he’d had a challenge, one with real meaning. And now...the Renais girl was offering that up to him with interest.

A soldier would have reported the incident to his superiors and let them take care of it. 

J wasn’t a soldier anymore. He was just a citizen, stranded in the middle of nowhere, bored out of his mind and desperate for a challenge.

He smiled at the red-headed warrior.

“Very well. We’ll destroy these fools at their own game.”

\---------------------------------


	7. The Girl That Burned

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liger explains the most important rule of parenting to Cain, and Renais finally does something that J approves of.

"Explain to me again these 'tests' my son must endure."

Liger and Cain were at NASA again, traveling to a conference with the companies responsible for human research into the G-Stones. Cain never said it, but of all the lands he'd visited, he disliked this 'Texas' most of all. There was simply so much _space_. Even their buildings had huge, unused space, wide corridors and open atriums only sparsely populated by greenery or chairs. Within such space, Liger's hoverboard made far more sense - he was almost as free to move as if he was under open sky. 

Madness. Another artifact of this strange civilization he'd sent his son to.

Liger floated beside him, reviewing documents on his mini-computer. If the man found Cain's constant questions irritating, he didn't voice it.

Instead, he chuckled. "You make it sound like some huge, dangerous task."

"Is it not?"

"Well, most kids don't _like_ tests, but they're not _dangerous_. Unless you think sitting in a classroom writing for forty minutes is dangerous."

"Then how is he to prove himself, if he cannot overcome crisis?"

Liger set down his pad and shook his head. "You've got to stop thinking we're like your world. We do just about everything we can to _prevent_ kids from being hurt." He paused, then added, "Your son's adopted parents have worked very hard to give him the best life they can. He's never been in danger, never gone hungry, always had food and shelter and love. Not every kid on this planet has that, but just about everyone agrees that they should."

"His parents do not push him to achieve more?"

"I'm sure they do! But their job is to protect him from all the bad stuff this world has to offer, for as long as they can."

"You are sure?"

Liger looked away, a sad expression crossing his usually cheerful face. "Well, that's what parents are supposed to do. Make sure nothing bad ever happens to their kid."

\----------------------------------

Half a galaxy away from Earth, on the Red Planet, J let Renais take over the scene, staging it to look like an accident had destroyed the technology and killed the scientists. She dragged the bodies further away from the portal, hooked her G-Stone into the remaining machines and fried their innards, and made sure to smash everything that even looked close to breakable. 

He found that he enjoyed watching her work. So often as a Soldato one appeared, fought a battle then left, no need for further tactics, always another crisis on the horizon preventing any time ‘wasted’ in rebuilding.

The idea that one could stage a scene, lie with the very ground itself, and manipulate opponents into a weakened position simply by moving bits of machinery and body parts was radical, in its way, and J found himself asking questions almost without realizing it.

The last question was perhaps the most important.

“Why that order?” She glanced up from affixing wires to her G-Stone from a black box half her height and covered in readouts and sensors and he clarified, "The order of your shots." 

She shrugged. 

“I thought it was obvious. After I confirmed that it was indeed BioNet, I had to bring down the whole operation without alerting those back on Earth of our presence.”

She pointed to the thick cord that had connected the humans through the portal.

“That gave them their oxygen supplies, but also connected their coms and recording equipment. So it had to go first. Then the portal, to prevent them from returning.”

“And then the men? You could have taken your time with the second shot and not missed.”

At the mention of the two dead men, Renais’s stone flared, frying the machine as intended. She disconnected the wires. 

“I didn’t miss. One of the reasons I took so long listening to their conversation was to confirm their identities.”

She pointed to the man she’d shot in the back of the skull. She had since torn the back of the suit open, hiding the entrance wound. Already the flesh was being eaten away by the Red atmosphere, further hiding the true cause of death.

“He was just a guard. He did his job, went home every night, and didn’t care one way or another about what BioNet did. He got a quick death, exactly as he deserved.”

“Which means the other didn’t?”

Another machine overloaded, anger an easy power-source.

“Dr. Frans. He was the director of bio-research. Mostly chemical weapons, which is why he was here. He didn’t do much to me, but I could hear his experiments from where they kept me. He preferred to test on humans. He said he got better data that way.” 

She pulled the wires off before the machine could fully explode, but it was still smoking far more than any of the others. Anger flickered on her face, even half an hour after dispatching the BioNet scientist.

"Tell me more of these men."

She nodded, and opened her mouth to speak…

Only for a shout to ring out from both their helmets.

“J! Quit wasting time and get Renais back here!” Tomoro’s voice was full of static, but loud enough to make Renais cover her ears.

J huffed, a bit guiltily. He should have contacted Tomoro as soon as the storm died down - the little AI was probably worried sick. Plus, mission protocol existed for a reason. He might not be a soldier any more, but that didn’t mean he could break the sensible rules.

He raised a hand to his helm. “J here. Renais is fine. We’ll be heading back - “

“No she’s not. I don’t know what she’s doing, but her vitals are off the charts! She needs to get to medical _now_.”

J turned back to Renais, certain she would deny it…

But he knew human expressions well enough now to recognize the guilt on her face.

“Woman, have you failed to tell me something?”

“Uh, well, I might be overheating. And, uh, discharging it through the G-Stone doesn’t seem to be working…”

His eyes narrowed, and he noticed how her hands were shaking as she disconnected the final machine. It had been melted into a sparking, putred mess. Perhaps that should have notified J of her condition - no matter how weak human technology was, metal was still metal, and she had melted through the case with her bare hands.

“Tell her to power down!”

“I’m not going to make you carry me all the way back to base!”

J stood and stalked towards the girl. “You will do as Tomoro says. Or I will make you.”

She stared up at him, then swallowed heavily. Perhaps she realized that there was no way to get out of it. Or that she was going to have to demonstrate her trust eventually if she expected them to be her allies. Either way, she nodded.

Then - 

She collapsed forwards. J reached out to catch her, but jerked back, shocked at the sheer amount of heat she was releasing. Around them, the canyon doubled its already blistering temperature. The sand beneath her crumpled form began to melt, silicon turning to glass. Steam rose instantly from her form and flickers of flame danced around her, as the weaker parts of the atmosphere oxidized the instant they touched her. And somehow she had contained all that power within her. Half a day she had been out in the heat of the Red Planet, willingly overloading her system just to get her revenge, and now the whole world felt the consequences.

“S-sorry.”

But J had fought on the surface of the sun, once. Now his ship rested within the bowels of a human volcano. Her heat was nothing to him.

So he picked her up, slung her over a shoulder, and repeated the same trek he had all those months ago. 

\------------------------------------------ 

But this time...This time the girl wasn’t a silent burden. Nor were the winds nearly as dangerous as those of five cycles ago. So J pushed on, and the girl...talked.

The Soldato had assumed the girl to be weak, for having been so hesitant to share her past. Now he wondered if she had been crafty instead, downplaying her abilities so as to be underestimated. J certainly hadn’t expected to find the mind of a tactician under her malfunctioning body.

But she proved him wrong.

“I was planning on hiding out in the caves, if you decided not to help. But now...I think there are some things we can do to be better prepared the next time they return.

“If they return." J added, but Renais shook her head, the simple action alone making her temperature spike.

“Your atmosphere is too tempting to them. They’ll be back, maybe with reinforcements.”

“Tell me of their warriors.”

She complied, speaking as he scaled canyons and fought the winds. He learned of Gimlet, a monster so terrible that her G-Stone sparked when she spoke of him. Of Shou, a warrior equal to Cain’s protegee. And far more beyond.

She spoke of weapons, giant tanks and nuclear powered mecha, of missiles and gasses and biological monsters unleashed on unsuspecting populations. Of the scientists who created these for the purposes of profit and science alone, needing no external threat to find excuse to push their creations beyond the bounds of sanity.

And perhaps worse, of the hundreds of people who went to work for them every day, received their paychecks, and returned home with no though to the horrors that happened under their noses. The guard and the doctor, simply tiny cogs in a vast machine made possible the the dysfunction of the human world. 

In less than an hour she described all of these, and outlined simple plans to deal with them with such casual cruelty that a Green would be horrified. Explosions, traps, all things she called ‘guerrilla tactics’ that should have horrified a Soldato, but J couldn’t help listening to with fascination at this totally new kind of war.

When they reached the compound, they were chatting lightly of ways to speed the journey back to the portal, and J found himself completely re-evaluating the girl’s use. Not just as a weapon or a burden, but as an asset, fully capable of acting on her own. The thought was...new. Not since the war had he been able to rely upon another's competence. And while the girl had only just proved her skills, somehow he found himself fascinated and wanting to learn more.

\------------------------- 

Tomoro almost couldn’t believe it when J carried Renais into the compound and they were _talking_. More than talking, J was listening close to the girl’s words and responding as if he found merit in what she said...even if he didn’t always agree. Had Tomoro not been listening in on the coms, the AI would have never believed it.

But he could feel the results pulse around the two: while before there had always been an undercurrent of warry distrust between them, now their energy seemed to feed off the other’s, and Renais was even grinning beneath her helm. 

That infectious mischief was likely all that was keeping her conscious, and loathe though Tomoro was to interrupt the first good conversation between his two favorite people…he did need to take charge.

“J. Take Renais to the medical wing _now_. I need to vent her systems. Renais, when I said power down, I meant _all the way_. You won’t want to be conscious for this. In fact, I’m not sure how you’re conscious at all. Your human brain should be melting right now. No, don’t say anything. It’ll just put more heat in your systems. J! I said move it!”

His tone seemed to shock the cyborgs into action. Renais slumped on J’s back, and J sped to the medical room, Tomoro having already prepared it for the worst - and this certainly was worst, given the readings the AI was getting from the girl. She was alive, but...

How did she keep surviving these things? And how could Tomoro prevent her from doing anything so _stupid_ in the future?


	8. Across a Sea of Sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Renais and J travel to the nearest town for a much-needed doctor's visit, and a meeting at NASA suddenly goes sour, prompting Liger to reveal an unexpected secret.

She woke up during the vent. Liquid fire ran through her veins and for a moment she was back, back under the knife and the scalpel, back to biting tongue and hoping, hoping this time she’d have the strength to end it all.

But this time, there was a roar. Beyond the dark room, beyond the humming machines, there was an endless ocean of wind. Surrounding her. Protecting her. She was safe. 

Tomoro didn’t understand why Renais’ vitals spiked one last time before returning to normal. The AI added it to his data on the girl and thought nothing more of it, rushing off after the next problem. But on the table, Renais relaxed and accepted the pain as finally worth it.

\-------------------------------------- 

Cain disliked the meetings Liger and Taiga brought him to. Humans were so full of pettiness and greed, and to watch grown adults bicker like children over the scraps Cain was willing to give them was embarrassing for all involved. But it was worth it to see the two men work, balancing the dozens of demands with the fineness of a Royal backed by the mind of a Scientist.

And if, occasionally, Liger or Taiga had Cain play the stoic alien, well, no harm done there, and it often had amusing results. 

This meeting, for example, was teaching Cain much about the internal politics of the country Liger claimed as home and about the intricacies of resource allocation. Money, space and time were all squabbled over while Liger sat back and listened to both the scientists from his organization - NASA - and the various outsiders-but-not-quite he called 'contractors'. Some of these contractors were overjoyed at increases in 'budget' given as rewards for success. Though Cain only knew this from his sensing of their emotions, as verbally they all simply asked for _more_. In comparison, other contractors were disappointed when their 'funding' was removed or decreased. 

None nearly as vocally as the men from and organization called BioNet, however.

"Why have you dropped our grant?" The spokesman demanded. "We have had more success than half of the room here!"

"Monsieur Roux..." Liger's assistant, Stallion White, spoke, "You destroyed the last G-Stone we gave you."

"It was lost in an experiment to bend space itself. A promising success, if you would only allocate a replacement..."

Other scientists around the table scoffed at this, the clear undercurrent that _they_ had not lost their core component of their research. Still, Liger pinched his nose and stepped in before angry words could be exchanged.

"Roux, that is not the only reason you've been cut. We cannot fund an organization under investigation by another branch of our government."

Anger flashed in M. Roux, sensed only by Cain, for outwardly he dismissed the statement. "We have spoken to our contacts at the Pentagon. They have assured us that investigation is a mere clerical error."

Stallion and several of the other scientists sputtered at this, and there were mutters of _big investigation for a 'mere' error_ and _aren't they arms dealers?_ around the table, all sentiments Cain did not quite understand, but could feel the disbelief.

But Liger ignored them. "The fact remains that you are still under investigation. Add that to the loss of your G-Stone, and NASA can't in good conscious continue your funding, no matter how ambitious your project." 

There were nods around the table, from both outside contractors and government representatives.

The BioNet representative sneered. "Isn't it a bit hypocritical, _you_ judging us for suspicion of illegal activity."

Liger froze, and turned carefully to Roux. The sharp spike of anger was so uncharacteristic for the man that Cain was almost shocked out of his corner.

"What, exactly, are you referring to?"

Roux shrugged. "Well, we all know where your daughter was found. And what she was."

Cain expected Liger to snap. The flood of emotions was so strong that it should have broken the little man in two. And Cain was far from the only one in the room suddenly riveted by Liger. Stallion's knuckles had gone white, and if humans could produce psy-blasts Roux would have been a smear on the carpet, so strong was his glare. Other scientists had gasped at what Roux had said, reading in some implication that Cain didn't understand, but must have been dire, given the reactions of all in the room. 

And Roux...he smiled as if he had somehow _won_.

Maybe he had. A moment later, Liger said "I will recuse myself from the budget committee, if you believe my perspective to be flawed. And that is all I will say on this topic. Moving on..."

Roux sat back, clearly satisfied, and the meeting moved on, everyone else in the room glancing frequently at Liger, as if they expected him to explode at any second. Cain could have told them no such thing would have happened - Liger's emotions had evaporated as quickly as they had come, leaving him a shell of the normally passionate man, so empty that Cain could barely believe the ease at which he functioned. But everything seemed different after that, as if the whole room, barring BioNet, had agreed to end the meeting as fast as possible. For people without psychic abilities, they all seemed to understand something was deeply wrong with their leader. 

It was only after the meeting had ended, two hours later, and Cain and Liger were the only ones left in the room, that Liger finally let himself feel again.

Slow at first, then a flood of sorrow engulfed the man, though from the outside there was only a waver in his voice as he turned to Cain.

"...you must be confused."

Cain nodded, far more concerned for his friend than any explanation. But somehow, speaking seemed to help the man.

"Do you know how my daughter died?"

\-----------------------------------

“You’re going to a real doctor.” 

The way J said it, there was no room for argument. 

Tomoro expected Renais to argue. But instead she sat up in the medical bed she’d been confined to for the last three days and sighed.

“You’re probably right. I’m no good to anyone like this. As long as your doctors don’t haul me off for experiments, I’ll do whatever they want to get me back on my feet.”

Beyond surprised, Tomoro was stunned. J routinely avoided even basic maintenance and here was a woman who had every reason to be terrified of more surgery accepting as if was the most obvious choice, though her G-stone sparked at the courage it took to make the pronouncement.

J seemed to take it in stride. “Good. We need supplies anyways - we’ll go into town when you’re ready.”

Renais eased off the bed, taking a moment to run a self-diagnostic before standing straight and smiling.

“The sooner the better. I think we have at least another month before BioNet is back, but I don’t want to leave that to chance.”

“Correct. Tomoro should not be left undefended close to the portal, either.”

The AI sputtered. “I have my own defenses! I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself!”

“We won’t let it come to that.” Renais said, taking the time to reassure her friend.

But J was already on the move, only glancing over his shoulder to say, “Hurry up, woman.”

Her face pinched into a pout. While following their battle J had seemed to accept her completely as an equal, now he was back to treating her as a bother.

But he waited in the airlock for her, holding it open almost like a gentleman, and the fact that he spoke to her at all indicated that he had thawed somewhat to her presence. 

It was a start. And maybe all she gave him was a break from the monotony of his life, but that was enough to ensure her place for now.

Smiling cautiously, Renais followed J into the canyon.

\------------------------------------- 

The strangest thing about the trip was the vehicle they traveled in. Somehow, Renais had pictured in her mind a truck. Or, given J’s occasional mention of flight, a mini plane of some sort.

Instead, Tomoro had lifted a boat from the sands. 

At least, that was how Renais could understand it. The general shape was that of a flat boat, just wide enough for two people to sit facing each-other, while another sat at the bow. There seemed to be no engine where she would have expected one. In the rear a flat box that reminded her of a medieval cart was attached. That was easy enough to understand: J had said they needed supplies, specifically replacements for the damaged array poles. The boat itself wasn’t big enough to hold much, but the cart clearly could extend if needed. Additionally, collapsed onto the cart, extending from the back of the boat, taking the place of the tiller, was a long pole that Renais instinctively knew to be a mast. 

J confirmed her guess a moment later.

“If the mini-arc every runs out of power, the sail can be used as backup. It’s far faster than regular power, but with unpredictable winds it can be dangerous.”

“Huh.” She climbed into the boat and sat where directed while J took the helm. 

There was no obvious wheel, just as there was no obvious engine, but the moment he sat a control panel lit up before him, and the whole boat began to hum. A second later Renais felt a jolt as the boat lifted off the ground and began to hover.

“Half way between pod-racers and Little House on the Prairie. Neat.”

J glanced over his shoulder at her, clearly not understanding a word she said, but apparently assigned it to ‘stupid human stuff’ and returned quickly to the controls. At his prompting the boat shifted and turned, aligning itself perpendicular to the canyon. The unseen engine hummed louder, and the next second they were off.

The next four hours were...interesting. The little boat skimmed on the surface of the sands, speeding up to go over the canyons, slowing on the flat stretches, J constantly needing to adjust their speed and trajectory as winds buffeted the small boat around. 

It certainly wasn’t an easy ride. Renais had to clutch the seat each time they went over a canyon and the winds shoved hard enough that she almost hit the other seat a few times...though she almost suspected J of doing that on purpose, given his smirk as she swore and fought to regain her balance. But there was wind in her hair and a whole world around her to view, stretched out in its austere glory all around them. Mountains behind them, canyons all round, and sand as far as the eye could see before them. The clouds far above streamed, making shadows that flowed across the landscape, the tiny boat racing behind them as the crashed and swirled together. Renais found herself jostled for almost the entire trip: but at the same time it was exhilarating. 

And the idea that J had once flown in this - what a sight that would have been! No wonder he had no trouble navigating the boat through the gales and could climb towers in a storm. His body must have been built for it.

They didn't speak much over the trip, the winds stealing their voice even from beneath the helms and J seeming content with the silence. Only at the very beginning, and the very end, did he speak out, and only to confirm the story Renais and Tomoro had come up with.

“I will do the talking.” He instructed as he slowed the boat. 

Renais could only guess at the exact location of the town, the scenery seeming barely different from the desert they’d traveled through over the morning. J steered them towards a dark patch in the sands, the speed of their trip turning it from a far off bruise to a large valley in the surrounding plateau almost as fast as she noticed it. A few moments later - they were traveling _very_ fast - she could make out the strange flower windmills ringing the edge of the valley, and then the clear, shimmering sails that were so familiar from their own farm.

“If anyone asks, direct them to me.”

Renais nodded as the boat slowed again, trying not to roll her eyes at his instructions. Over the last couple months she had discovered very few things about her companion, but one of the most obvious was his complete lack of subtly. Maybe that was a characteristic picked up from the years of isolation, but Renais guessed that J had been curt even before then, having no tolerance for useless chatter or subterfuge. 

So directing any questions to him was not because he would know how to lie better, but rather that he simply wouldn’t answer at all, and assuming Red Planeters were anything like Earthlings, one glare would silence any prying questions. 

Not that Renais was planning to open her mouth at all: her atrocious accent would give her away. She might be able to follow most everything in the Red language, but her odd, stilted speech would immediately mark her as an outsider. Better, then, to pretend to be mute and dumb and follow quietly along behind her guide.

Not that it was hard! The town didn’t look like much, but it was different than the compound she’d been stuck in for going on two months and the only other people she’d seen beyond J were the two men she’d brutally murdered. The possibility of new faces and new technology silenced her more effectively than any order could have.

\------------ 

The town didn’t have a name. When Renais asked, on the trip over, J looked at her like she was mad. “Why name something everyone knows?” Though, later, Tomoro told her that most of the frontier towns were listed by their number in the construction order or their coordinates. So base #345, 45, 150 - almost literally on the other side of the planet from the initial colonization site. 

J’s compound was similarly unnamed, and it wasn’t uncommon for array farmers to simply abandon their compounds when the work or the isolation got too much, so dotted around the landscape were hundreds of empty, unpowered homes, left for whoever wanted to claim them. Ghost towns were rarer, but Renais did wonder the moment they climbed down into the valley and there was not a single person on the street.

If it could be called a street. Just like at J’s compound, the buildings were built into the rock walls, these ones with staircases and landings connecting the various structures. A few bridges crossed the gap, but with nothing to protect from the wind Renais wasn’t sure if she would chance crossing the flimsy looking things - especially with the lack of any guard rails. 

Everything was weathered, from the metal doors to the cut stone pathways, the few windows reflecting simply more sandy stone, making the town fade into the rock itself. Renais was reminded of pictures she’d seen of pueblo's in the Americas - though really what it reminded her most of was gulls nesting on the cliffs, invisible unless one looked close or caught the sight of a gull coming home to roost.

As they made their way down the path into the valley towards one nondescript door out of a dozen others there was occasional activity. Doors opened and closed above them, there were short shouts and the rumble of machinery. Once another transport crossed above the canyon, shadowing them for only a moment. But no one stayed outside long enough for Renais to get a good look at them, and it wasn’t as if she would allow herself to stare anyways.

It was only when they finally reached the door that she got her first look at a Red other than J.

The door slammed open the instant they arrived on the doctor’s floor, and a immensely tall red-headed woman popped out.

“Sky and Stars, it’s true! Soldato J 002 has finally called in a maintenance request!” 

The door closed behind her loud enough to cause a few rocks to tumble off the canyon wall, and Renais winced, hiding herself behind J and peering out at the woman. She really was huge - equal in height to the Soldato but built with thick muscles rather than lean. She must have weighed twice that of J, just by muscle mass alone. Her feathery red hair was just as long, cascading down her back with the signature Red forelock obscuring half her face. Her nose was not nearly as long as J’s, but it still looked far more like a beak than anything human. And her clothes...well, if this was what Renais’s uniform was designed to clothe, then no wonder it was initially so loose. Her armor actually _fit_ , even if it looked nothing like J’s.

The biggest difference between J and this woman, though, was the wide, teasing smile.

“A cycle and a half I’ve been after you for yearly maintenance, and now you come?”

“Y-967.”

“Yn, please. Order 625 dictates exmilitary must to return to civilian names to expedite reintegration.”

Renais could tell J bit back a snide comment at that and instead said. “I'm not here for me.”

“Really. Then who…” But that was when the woman caught sight of Renais looking from around J’s shoulder. “...who is that?”

“Your patient.”


	9. Priests and Doctors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liger explains what happened to his daughter, and Renais makes a new friend.

The mug of coffee steamed in Liger’s hands, and he wouldn’t meet Cain’s eyes. Shame had joined sorrow in the man’s emotions, and Cain’s heart hurt for his friend even as confusion rose.

“Your daughter...she was a priestess of some kind, correct?”

Liger jerked, surprise pulling him from his sorrow for a moment.

“... _priest_?” Then he said, mostly to himself “...you people are so different from humans.” Then, stronger, “Why do you say that?”

“...forgive me, but I read the dossier on your daughter’s death. It said her body was found following a bombing in Istanbul. In an area serving tourists, yes?”

Liger nodded, inexplicable guilt starting to show on his face.

“Based on the clothes on the body, and the other people killed in the explosion, she was performing the work of a - the closest my translation could give me was ‘vestal virgin’. A woman whose job is to heal those with illness of the soul.”

Liger laughed, a sad, broken note. “That makes it sound so...wholesome.”

Cain tried to comfort him. “I could understand why you might be disappointed that your daughter did not follow you into the sciences. But her work was honorable, holy even. To serve the emotional needs of a people is hard, and such service is highly valued on my world. I do not understand why you feel shame at such a thing.”

“...Cain, on Earth, that job is the most shameful thing a girl can possibly do. It’s criminal.”

“ _What_?”

“More than that, she was forced into it. The...the evidence found on the body indicated suggests that she had been working as a streetwalker for years, probably since she was kidnapped. My little girl was...was…”

His voice broke, and he buried his head in his hands. 

Cain placed a hand on his shoulder, speechless. The idea that someone could be _forced_ into the priesthood was madness. And then it followed that, if one were forced to join, then also the poor girl had been forced to...the thought turned his stomach. Humans were barbaric, but...surely not. There were only rumors of such things in the Trinary system, happening only in terribly isolated places where something also went terribly wrong. It was less common than Reds turning to _cannibalism_. 

And Liger had never spoken of it. Never even hinted that such a horrifying, tragic thing had befallen his family.

“No one...says anything. When I found out...when the report came in, I couldn’t even go to pick up the body. Guy had to do it for me. I couldn’t stand to see my little girl like that. Broken. Wounded. After all those years, I had kept hoping that maybe she was still alive, that I could find her and bring her home. But instead...she had been alive, and in horrible pain, for all those years, and I had done _nothing_. Nothing but bury her next to her mother.”

He shook his head.

“And then...then another bombing took out the records. So no leads to who had taken her. Not even dental records remaining. No way of getting justice. Just a body, more ash than flesh, that I couldn’t bare to look at. And then…”

“And then people like Roux use it like a trump card. And they’re _right_ damn them. I can’t be impartial, when it comes to things like that. Whoever took her _won_ , and I have no right to be angry, when it was my failure as a father that meant she never came home…”

“So I joke about it, and act like it wasn’t important, because otherwise...otherwise look at me.” Another sad laugh, brittle and broken, and Liger paused there for a moment. Then, he shook his head and the next laugh just as brittle, but also dismissive, as if his earlier words were something Cain couldn't possibly care about. 

“Look at me. I’m a mess. You don’t need to hear this. Your son is doing fine, and he’ll come around to seeing you. Don’t listen to my doom and gloom. C’mon - I think Guy is picking us up at the with FiGar.”

And just like that, the man bottled up all his pain, shoved it down under his normal happy persona, and seemed perfectly back to normal. As if he hadn’t been close to tears a few moments before. 

Cain was impressed, and his heart went out to his friend. But as a warrior, there was nothing he could do to help Liger. No words he could say, no enemy to fight to help ease the pain, no priest he could recommend to heal the man's sorrow. So he too resolved to not pressure the man into speaking more on the situation. Something so terrible was best forgotten.

\-------------------------

“I found her wandering the wastes. Tomoro guessed she must have been made by one of those separatist Green compounds.”

Yn had pulled them immediately into her office the instant she saw Renais. Now the tall woman was pacing around the girl scanning her and asking punishing questions directed at J.

“Cultists. That’s certainly what it looks like. Is she the least bit sane?”

“She seems smart enough. _Doesn’t talk_.” He emphasized as Renais opened her mouth to protest. “And happy enough to work for her keep.”

“Hmm. How long was she in the wastes?”

“Not long. But she used an ES window to escape.”

“So no way to know where she came from.” J said nothing, letting Yn draw her own conclusions. “Did she come with the stone? Might be able to track them with it.”

“Ah - the stone is hers, but Tomoro made the GS modifications.”

Yn’s face contorted. “What?!”

“She was dying. We had no other choice. Her design -”

But Yn had stopped paying attention to J, and instead rounded on Renais.

“Clothes. Off.” 

Renais yelped when the woman's hands went to her straps, looking deeply uncomfortable, and J remembered Tomoro’s warnings.

“She does not like to expose herself.” Renais nodded fast, and pointed to the large windows behind her.

Yn looked towards the windows, confused as to how anyone could be afraid of a little sunlight, but gestured to a back room. “We’ll probably need the stronger modbay anyways.”

“TOMORO 117 has sent in the initial scans.” Chimed a voice from the ceiling as the second room lit up.

Renais glanced around, finding a space almost identical to the medical room back at the compound. The largest difference was a shimmering field that surrounded the examination table that could be clearly hardened into a containment unit. That and the cube looking down at her from the monitors rather than the normal bouncing eyeball.

“Thank you, TAMARA.” The cube spun a smile as Yn continued, “Please display on screen four.”

As Renais undressed Yn summoned additional tools from other rooms and affixed a pair of lights to her headband, transforming from friend to doctor in a few moments.

Only to break it when she turned and got her first look at Renais without clothes.

Renais didn't know the word she said, but the meaning was clear. As was the expression on Yn’s face. It was odd to realize, though, that this was the first time she’d seen genuine horror on a Red Planeter. And from a doctor to boot.

“J! Get your slow ass in here!”

The Soldato poked his nose around the door, forcing Renais to hurriedly cover her chest. At her expression he looked away, acting out of uncharacteristic kindness.

“You brought me a bloody Priest! You know I can’t -”

“She’s not a priest.”

“Like stars she isn’t. She’s castrated, J.”

“Genetically. Her biology -”

“Makes no _sense_. Its retrograde at best. Criminal at worst. She’d be terminated if she ever set foot on the Green Planet!”

“This isn’t the Green Planet. I only need her to be able to work on the surface. You don’t need to do anything more.”

Yn opened her mouth to argue, then closed it and shook her head. “I can't believe you. You're not the least bit horrified at this? She’s a crime against everything the priests espouse, and then you had to go and run her through with more cybernetics.”

“It saved her life.”

“What kind of life? She’ll never be able to perform what she was designed to do! She - “

“You are aware that she can understand everything you’re saying, right?”

Yn’s mouth snapped closed, and she swiveled to look at her patient. When Renais nodded, once, her face drained of color and she physically dragged J from the room, slamming the door behind her. Not that it made much difference - even with the sound-proofing Renais could hear everything they were saying in the other room.  
_  
“If the priesthood gets word of this - “_

_“They won’t. And even if they did, she isn’t a priest.”_

_“You keep saying that. But one look at her - “_

_“And? Just because we chose our bodies does not mean she did. Quite the opposite. We are the outliers here.”_

_“But if she has the genes…they’d take my position away if I operated on a priest. My hands are - “_ Again, a word Renais didn’t understand, but could guess at with the miserable, guilty tone the Saldara used. _**Unclean.** _

_“I doubt she cares. Your the best doctor in - ”_

_“Well, I do! There’s a reason the genome is restricted. Only priests - “_

_“Who’s going to tell them? You?”_

“You probably shouldn’t be listening to that.”

Renais jerked, and turned to look at the spinning cube.

It brightened slightly, its version of a smile.

“I can tell you’re listening. I can tell you can talk, too. I’m conducting the brain scans right now. Yn is going to bust a gasket when she sees them.”

Renais licked her lips and said, cautiously, “You’re...Tamara?”

“Yes! TAMARA-0129. And you must be Renais. Tomoro has told me all about you!”

Apparently, Tamara could read expressions much better than Tomoro, because she followed that with, “But don’t worry, I won’t tell. It’ll make it easier on Yn if she doesn’t know.”

“Is she going to...try to kill me?”

“What? Oh! No. She’s just arguing for appearances' sake. Doctors aren’t supposed to do non-standard gene-mods or operate on anyone who has them. But most everybody out here needs them, in one way or another. The cloud scientists are always making advancements and don’t have much patience to wait for priesthood approval and dissemination. And some stuff that the priests don’t like is necessary out on the wastes. Like loneliness suppressors or other mental stuff. Everybody uses them, and then Yn has to fix them up when something goes wrong.”

She paused then said, “But I guess you wouldn't know that if the only person you've met is Mr. Perfect out there.” And rolled her self over, the exact gesture Tomoro did to indicate rolling eyes.

She continued, “Anyways, she’ll argue for longer, because your mod is really extreme, but she’ll eventually come around. In the meantime, let me do a full scan and repair what I can - just sit back and relax, okay?”

Renais complied, but said, “You won't tell these ‘priests' will you?”

The bubbly AI laughed. “Goodness, no. An AI acting on their own? We’re not supposed to _think_. We’re not even people, technically. They wouldn't even hesitate to destroy me even if I brought heresy to their attention.”

“That’s horrible!”

The AI mimed a blink. “...I think I understand why Tomoro likes you so much. Are all humans like you?”

Renais kept silent, thinking of the recordings happening around her.

Tamara chuckled. “You really are a good match for the Soldato. I didn't even see your brain waves twitch at that. You must have had good training. No wonder Yn thinks you're a priest.”

Then, before Renais could risk comprising her cover more, the AI switched topics.

“Do you want me to show you what we plan to do?”

“Yes, please.”

A screen lit up with an image of Renais internals, familiar from scans Tomoro had done, but with far more detail. Renais could actually see the flow of liquids through her various mechanical systems, as well as her heartbeat and the pulse of the G Stone system. She couldn't read the glyphs the Reds used to write with, but half a dozen paragraphs appeared beside her silhouette, several in the blue that she had come to learn to be a negative color according to the Reds. Other screens showed something like x-rays of different parts of her, mostly focused on discovering the functions of various machines. Others showed guesses to full systems, whether they be genetic, like her circulatory system, mechanical, like BioNet's power system, or a mix of both, as with her muscular system. Tamara quickly ran through them all.

“Well, here are your internals now. Yn won’t say this, but Tomoro did a really good job. Especially with what he had on hand. And your G-Stone - I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as well bonded to a Green device. Even in the war only Royals could do what you’re doing. Pity you didn’t get picked up earlier - we could have used someone like you against the Zonders.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Your design is…”

The AI paused, and Renais quickly put in, “Horrible. I know, yes.”

“You burn like a _phoenix_.”

Renais started, the word inexplicably the same in Red as her own language. But Tamara bubbled on, not noticing the spike in the readouts, or simply assuming it was related to discussing the difficult topic of Renais design.

“I have no idea what your creators were thinking. Green, Red, Human - it doesn’t make sense for what I know about any of them. That you function at all is a testament to your Will.”

Renais pulled herself back to the topic on hand. “Can you...fix that?”

Tamara sighed. “No, unfortunately. Unless Yn knows something I don’t...everything builds on itself. The best we could do would be to transfer you to a whole new body, and the priests got rid of that as soon as the war was over. And Yn might push things far, but nobody would break that rule. And with this…” She lit up a section of her scan, one centering on Renais’s nervous system. “I’m not even sure if that would work. You’ve got self-destruct coding in just about every machine in your body. The same kind of kill-coding the Arcs had. Whoever made you was terrified of what you might become.”

She shook her cube side to side, a clear frown. “There are little things we can do to make your design better. But Yn will need to do them: she’s an expert at working around other designs. We can fix some of the gene-mod, but not all of it. You’d need a cloud scientist to do a full mod and J just doesn’t have those connections anymore. We can clean your mechanics better than Tomoro did, and make it so they won’t break down in the future, even in the heat, but we can’t change them much. And we’ll get you a better suit, so you can work outside without danger of overheating. The only reason Tomoro didn’t give you that to begin with was because his compound is designed for full Reds. Everyone else needs cold suit - everyone who isn’t _crazy_ that is.”

Renais chuckled, and Tamara beamed. 

“See? She can smile.” Then she called out, “Yn! The scans are done! Stop being so lazy and get to work!”

The tirade of complaints slowed from outside, and Yn returned, grumbling. She seemed to have calmed down, though. 

“I must be the only Saldara in the world with a Tamara who orders me around.”

“You’re the only Saldara to still have a Tamara at all!”

Yn rolled her eyes and turned to the readouts. “Yes, yes. And I’m so lucky to have you.”

“And you know it!” 

The room brightened around them, and Yn adjusted the lights on her headband, falling easily back to seriousness as her eyes scanned the suggestions Tamara had indicated.

“J, this will take a while. Go ahead and get your orders done. She’ll be ready when you get back.”

J glanced at Renais, and at the wall of scans. He only relaxed when she nodded, once.

“I’ll return for the major modifications.”

“What, don’t trust me?”

He paused at the office door. “She may need my - “ He searched for the word, “ - support.” Then he left, Yn staring in clear shock after him.

She rounded on her patient. “Not a priest, he says. Tell me, girl, who else could convince that man to care about someone else?”


	10. Busted not Broke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yn gets to work on her patient, and Cain finds out that there might be more to Liger's daughter's 'death' than even Liger realizes.

Cain saw Liger off at the half-completed Orbital Base. The sight of it always sent a shiver of fear down Cain's spine. He had just been a child when the Green Planet's moon had been destroyed, and seeing half-built satellites always reminded him of those first, horrible images.

But to find the Z-Crystal shards before they developed into full Zonders the humans needed a better scanning location. And their planetary government - the "United Nations" - had already approved the idea before Cain had come with the technology to make it possible. Even then, everything involved was on the cutting edge of human technology, several scientists only coming to their breakthroughs after being rescued from Zonderization. The fact that Liger and the other project heads then gave those humans the run of the station design just showed how utterly mad the entire species was. It was possible that they might have been able to fight off full Zonders all on their own, through sheer guts and determination. A species far better to have as a friend than as an enemy.

"Liger seemed...quiet." Guy mentioned, as he flew FiGar back to Japan, Cain seated in the passenger seat.

"A man mentioned his daughter during the meeting at NASA. He didn't take it well."

"...oh." There was an odd tone in the cyborg's voice. At first, Cain merely assumed it was because of the terrible situation. 

"That was a great tragedy for your family. It was dishonorable for the BioNet representative to use it against Liger."

There was silence from the front cockpit, but Cain detected a spike in anger from Guy, and quickly added,

"But I will not speak of it again. I am sorry nothing further can be done on the matter."

“...yeah. It was really sad what happened to her. But at least we found the body.”

And there, for the first time, Cain detected a _lie_ from the human cyborg. 

The fact was so completely out of character for the human that for a moment Cain could not believe his senses. He had been there before when Guy had...not _lied_ exactly, but bent the truth based upon what normal, 'civilian' humans were allowed to know. And he had always done it for a good purpose. But this...

Liger truly believed his daughter had lived a horrific life before being killed in an equally horrific way. If Guy knew something that could lessen that pain, then why would he ever keep that from his uncle? Either to protect him from further pain, or...

Or there had been something more, that Liger had not seen. After all, Guy had been the one to retrieve what was left of the girl, and to make the funeral arrangements. Liger hadn't even been able to look at her. Could there have been some extra piece of information, from the body or the police investigation, that Guy was withholding from his uncle for some reason? 

And if so, what else could have possibly happened to the girl that would lead Guy Shishio to lie to his very family to keep silent?

\-------------------------------- 

Undergoing maintenance was hard. It brought back too many ugly memories. But, somehow, Tomoro could keep it at bay with his chattering and excited suggestions. The child-like AI seemed so...innocent, completely oblivious of her own insecurities, and yet so easily catered to her fears that she knew some of the childish chatter was just an act for her sake. But she appreciated the kindness nonetheless.

But Tamara quieted when Yn took control, and Renais felt her heart rate jump immediately at the cool, detached look in the Saldara’s eyes. Hard, not to hear the words _should be terminated_ when those eyes fell on her, just as dispassionate as all the scientists at BioNet, with no real proof that she was any less likely to commit horrors.

And, despite all her fears, Renais wasn’t supposed to speak out. 

“Yn, if you explain what you are doing, I think her stone will stop flaring.” 

The Saldara glanced up at the AI, then back at Renais. Even when the human nodded, she didn’t seem particularly convinced that Renais could understand her. Still…

“Hmm. A log for the records would be useful. Especially if there are others like her…”

Then she removed the long purple gloves she’d been wearing, and Renais found herself staring at the doctor's hands. “Let’s start the physical examination, then.”

“I’ve prepared cooled gel for when your sensors overload.” Tamara responded, nudging a pan filled with greenish goop forward.

Yn raised a brow. “She really is that hot?” When Tamara nodded she _hmm_ ed again, and got to work.

What followed was the strangest doctor’s exam Renais had ever experienced. 

The Saldara’s hands were covered with smooth sensors, from her fingertips to palms. Even her nails were retractable, more like cats claws designed to draw and test blood. Glittering readouts attached to each sensor system, but it was obvious that the Saldara had no need for them. Her method of examination was to run her palms over the patient, eyes half closed and brow knit in concentration, readouts flickering in colors to which she paid no attention, calling out information to Tamara whenever she found something new to fix. She only paused when her sensors began to overheat, and then just long enough to press her hand into the cooled gel, returning with her hands cold enough to make Renais’s yelp. Her hands were demanding but soft, leaving not one inch of Renais untouched, detached as a human doctor but with none of the hesitance - or warning - when it came to private or uncouth areas.

Despite the embarrassment...it was the first prolonged physical contact Renais had felt in more than two years. And though her mind screamed against it, her body couldn’t help but yearn for the touch, relaxing under Yn’s administrations even as the Saldara acted as if she barely recognized Renais as sentient. 

But it didn’t hurt. And Yn’s hands were cool, and soft, and kind in the way of a doctor.

Against her better judgement, Renais relaxed, and let Yn get to work.

And her work was amazing. The exam took maybe a half hour. After that the Saldara began making minor alterations, the ‘repairs’ Tamara had spoken of. It was just as amazing to see the Saldara and her tools work. Yn moved her hands over Renais and bits of machinery shifted inside her, tiny alterations that were half chiropracty and half magnetism, those little shifts somehow removing weight and tension. 

The early gene-mod alterations were just as painless, similarly needing no invasive surgery, just a serum injected near the target area with a claw and controlled with a finger drawing a line on the flesh above. As Yn worked tension flowed out of Renais, not because she particularly trusted the other woman, but because years of little pains and miss-alignments were easing away. For the first time in years, it felt as if Renais could draw a full breath, without _things_ inside of her getting in the way. 

And, amidst the marvels of growing new tendons or altering veins to allow the flow of GS-Liquid, Yn began to speak.

“I’m sorry this happened to you.” Yn said, halfway through rewiring a vent system.

Renais shrugged. 

“They’re supposed to prevent things like this. The priests. That’s half the reason we have them.”

Another shrug, and then a wince when a device shifted inside her, forcing a cough. But Yn talked on, more to herself than to Renais.

“No unapproved gene-mod. No fully cybernetic bodies. No soulless chassis grown in vats. All to prevent people like you from being created. To prevent suffering.

“And yet, it still happens, and I still forget. Forget that not everyone has perfect bodies. That J and I are the freaks. That what was done to us - what we volunteered for - was only allowed because of the war.”

She looked away from her work for a moment, and when she turned back there was deep sadness in her eyes. 

“They didn’t want us to keep these bodies. Too close to weapons, they said. How could anyone desire a body they weren’t born into? And how could you justify allowing weapons to walk around free? 

“And they’re right, most of the time. The horrors I’ve seen, of people who’ve tried to build themselves bigger, stronger, faster, frying their bodies or their brains or both. Enough to make me wonder if I should have given it all up too, and gone back to being ‘appropriately augmented’. Whatever that means. 

“And then someone like you comes in, and it all falls to pieces. You’re built to break, and the tools I need to fix you are beyond my reach. How is that fair? How is that right?”

Even if Renais could speak, she didn't have the words to answer the Saldara. But it didn't seem to matter for the woman. She talked on as she worked, as if Renais was oblivious to her words. It was at once calming and a bit infuriating. So many BioNet doctors had talked like she wasn’t there, but at least this woman seemed to care when she caused pain. And, as condescending as it was, it gave Renais far more information about the world outside of J’s compound, and how Renais herself would fit into it.

Things went smoothly enough, slowly progressing from simple fixes to ones of the sort Renais was more familiar with. Yn apologize, again, for being unable to do a full gene-mod, even as she instructed any biological system without self-destruct coding to change to accept the charged GS-Liquid as well as blood. That modification only took an hour. An hour to do something BioNet had only dreamed of, and would have murdered thousands to get their hands on.

Renais tried to keep that in mind as the med-pod walls lifted around her and she forced herself to breath liquid for an hour. Only Tamara’s warning stopped her from breaking the walls then and there, not that Yn seemed to have even considered confinement might be troubling to her patient. 

There were a few mistakes that had Renais coughing blood, or bile, or GS-Liquid, which Yn was always quick to fix, even though it was damn painful in the meantime. The Saldara usually realized something was wrong even before Renais herself did, and she could steel herself for the pain upon hearing the Red equivalent of “ _Damn_ those idiots.” 

Renais learned several different Red curses over their day together and, despite the familiar pain, everything went smoothly enough until Yn explained - mostly to Tamara, rather than Renais - what outright removals she planned on making.

If it wasn’t clear yet that Renais could understand every word she was saying, it suddenly became _very_ apparent.

\----------

The call came through five turns after J left, as he was negotiating for the proper alloy to patch holes in the gas tube network. Livius rarely handed out large quantities of the hyper strong metal, but J had no interest in returning to town for every little correction, and was in the process of explaining that when Yn’s face appeared on Livius’s monitor.

“J! Your bloody priest is refusing treatment! Get back here!”

Livius’s brows rose, and suddenly J was the center of attention of everyone else in the store, even more so when he abruptly finished the deal and hurriedly left. The Soldato was notorious for never backing down, and Livi was left gasping at his remaining supply of hyper-alloy, while all around them rumors started to fly.

Those rumors would only get worse when everyone else saw the mess Renais had made of Yn’s scan room. When J arrived the girl had shoved herself into a corner, glaring daggers and covering her chest protectively, the med-pod and protective straps of the bed shattered to pieces and Yn savoring a black eye. Tamara had clearly attempted to pull the girl from the corner, and the result were three of her surgery arms bent and sparking, even as she continued to attempt to speak soothingly to the patient in an attempt to forestall any further damage.

“She won’t come out.” Yn said around her bloody teeth. “I was just going to remove some unnecessary organs. And she went mad.”

J glanced at Renais. She certainly looked mad. He could feel the heat roll off her from halfway across the room.

He sighed. “Is this a necessary medical procedure?”

Yn wiped the remaining blood from her teeth with a clean cloth. “Well, no. But if she isn’t a priest, then she really shouldn’t need breasts. They just get in the way…”

Renais made an incredibly displeased sound, and forced her way further into the corner.

“And she has several organs that don’t appear to do anything. Why she’s so attached to them…”

Renais caught J’s eye, and tried to indicate with widened eyes that _she_ was not the madwoman, but the crazy doctor.

Again, J sighed. “Yn. Just do the basics.”

“Well, I’ve done most everything, but she refuses to let me touch her now…”

“...let me talk to her alone.”

Yn nodded and retreated, while Tamara backed off and began repairing the room.

J walked over to the corner, and loomed above the human girl.

“Well?”

“She was going to cut off my breasts. And didn’t listen when I disagreed.”

“People of the Red Planet don’t have - “ he pointed to her chest.

“I’m not a Red Planeter. I like having breasts. But she didn’t care what I wanted. She saw something unnecessary, and wanted to cut it off!”

“...I’ll explain the situation to her.”

“I want to keep everything else, too!” She shouted after him as he walked back to the door.

“Well?” Yn hissed when he returned. “Did you make her see reason?”

J debated how to explain the situation to the Saldara. He’d only known the girl a few cycles, but even when she was acting irrational according to Red culture, he felt he could guess where she was coming from. But Yn would never understand such ‘weak' reasoning.

“...She might not be a priest, but she holds some of their beliefs.”

“Excuse me?”

“What would the priests say about removing anything ‘unnecessary'? Even if we can see it as useless…”

“... they think we should accept our bodies, however they may be.”

“...right. And if it isn’t actively hurting her...what’s the harm? It will help her feel more comfortable in her skin.”

Yn pressed her lips together, then sighed and gave in. “Fine. But the offer’s still open when she wants to finish the mod.”

“...just make her functional.” 

“Fine.”

They returned to find the girl with all of her undergarments on, acting as a kind of protective armor, and a laser knife clearly displayed next to her on the examination table. Yn sighed again, and got to work finishing up the remaining procedures. J stayed by the girl’s side for the next hour, holding her hand during the most painful procedures. And even if the Saldara only ever looked to J for confirmation, Renais breathed easier with him at her side. 

In the end, Yn left the girl to get dressed and give her final diagnosis in the main office. 

“She’s dehydrated and isn’t getting enough nutrients. Tamara had created a list of foods she can consume - make sure she eats something every few days. Pick up a cool-coat from Livi and she should be able to work outside. Beyond that...she’s as good as I can make her.”

J nodded, and glanced up to find Renais in the door, uniform back on and listening closely. 

“Anything else you need?”

J shook his head, and started to move towards the door…

Only to have his hand caught and dragged backwards.

“What?”

Renais pointed to the front, undamaged, examination table.

“We’re here for you, not me.”

She shook her head, and stamped her foot, her actions childish but the determined look on her face anything but.

Yn chuckled.

“She heard that you don’t come in for checkups. I guess she wants you to take the poison as well.”

J coughed. “But the cost…”

“Everyone gets a free checkup, you know that. And I’m happy to ignore my smashed med-pod if it means you actually get in the chair. Unless...you’re hiding something?”

J’s eyes narrowed, and he looked back and forth between the two woman, one nearly laughing, the other fierce with determination.

“...fine.”

Yn grinned. “About damn time. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten to play with a Soldato chassis!” 

\------------- 

Yn’s smile had faded after Tamara read off the scan and her own hands confirmed what the AI saw. She grumbled as she worked.

“...I thought it strange that the girl hadn’t eaten anything in four cycles. But J, do you eat at all?”

The Soldato looked away. “It is unnecessary to keep my components functioning.”

“You can’t live on your J-Jewel alone.” Before he could protest she added, “ And even if you could, you shouldn’t. Tamara has hundreds of recipes that both you and your friend can eat. Make the girl cook, if you don’t want to.” 

“She’s not a - “

“Anyone can learn to cook. And she seems stubborn enough that you might actually eat it. But that’s not all. How much are you sleeping?”

“It’s unnecessary to - “

“ - keep your components running? What about your brain? Your organics? They need rest, J. You need rest.”

J shrugged as Yn called up a healing field. His body took to it quickly, designed as it was to work specifically on Soldato chassis, but it distressed the doctor to see the color seep back into his skin after what must have been a whole cycle of overwork. 

“...there’s only me. To take care of the arrays. So it doesn’t matter if I’m scheduled for sleep or rest. If there’s a problem, someone needs to fix it.”

“How many arrays do you have now?”

“...fifty.”

Yn swore. “You should have a team of twenty taking care of those. Not one Soldato, a freak, and an AI.”

“But the work is important. The cities need air. And water. The reports say there’s never enough.”

“And it makes you feel like you’re doing something worthwhile, if you’re killing yourself every day for the greater good?”

J didn’t respond, but that in itself was more than enough answer.

“Fine. Do what you want. But don’t pretend that you don’t have enough credit to order some decent food and water rations. If just for the girl.”

“She’s not a pet.”

“She’s not a priest, either, as you keep telling me. Though why you would take her in, rather than just hire a much better hand…”

“No one wants to live so far from the city.”

“How can you be so sure she’ll be any different? She’s bad enough now - anti-social, distrustful of doctors and authority, touch-starved while pathologically averse to disrobing - who knows what else might develop out there in the wilds.”

“I just need her hands, Yn. Everything else is secondary.”

Yn pursed her lips. “You say that, J. Just like you say she’s not a priest. But everyone can see what she looks like. Even you. And how will manage when you’re spending cycles alone with her?”

J sneered as the healing field finished its run. “Like an adult, Yn. I’ve no need for help on that front. And I never have.”

The Saldara didn’t look convinced, but she waved him on. “If you say so. Just don’t come crying to me when you realize you’re addicted.”


	11. The Red Sphinx and its Master

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> BioNet continues to manipulate all who come into their path, while J goes shopping and Renais meets her first Trinary animal.

“Why did you bring up his daughter?”

Roux glanced up from the documents NASA had given over. His newest aid still had some training to do.

“I would have thought that to be obvious. He did everything we wanted.”

“Except we didn’t get our funding approved.”

The documents hit the seat of the plush limo BioNet had rented for the meeting. Outside the Houston sun broiled, but inside the car was as cold as Roux’s sneering tone. 

“He would have never approved it in the first place. His replacement on the committee will be far more...amenable to our ideas.”

“The weaponization project? Won’t Liger still intervene?” Slow aids did not last long at BioNet, and if his foolish questions were any indication, this aid would not last out the week.

Roux smiled, and glanced at the steely face of their driver over the limo partition. 

“He might try. But he of all people will be susceptible to the ‘safety of citizens’ argument. His daughter's death is the gift that keeps on giving in that respect.”

The aid’s brow creased. “...which one? The fake, or the real?” 

Roux's satisfied grin only widened, matching the rictus eternally frozen over the driver’s face. 

“Both. He thinks she was just a whore, and the scientific community will assume our cyborg experiments were perfect the first time round.”

“The only pity is that we lost the real body.” The driver said, mechanical voice rasping with irritation. He, off all the BioNet staff, was most irritated at the loss of their best guinea pig. Renais Cardiff had been his _personal_ project, and he had hoped to get many more years out of her.

“Don’t worry about that, Gimlet. We can convince the world that G-Stone energy is dangerous in some other way. There will be plenty of opportunities once we receive our next stone. And then...we'll have plenty more 'toys' to play with.”

The aid shivered as both Roux and Gimlet laughed gleefully at the thought.

\----------------------

No money changed hands when J and Renais left the clinic, which the human found odd. For all the Red Planeters’ talk of ‘credits’ their system didn’t seem to run on a physical money. J had ‘paid’ for Renais’s modifications out of his three years of unscheduled appointments, and somehow Renais and Yn’s pressure had ‘paid’ for J’s. 

It was a strange system. Especially so when Renais saw it at work with someone significantly less eager to bow to the whims of a Soldato or Saldara. 

Following Yn’s directions, J lead her from Yn’s clinic to a commissary, three floors up and at the back of a deep-drilled cavern.

She hadn’t realized it before, but Tomoro kept the lights low back at the compound, only bringing them to their full brightness when needed for specific things - such as light for the medbay or training room. But the cavern J showed her through was bright as outside, the ceiling painted a vibrant, glowing turquoise that looked nothing like the Red sky...but also subtly _off_ from what Renais remembered of Earth. The various Red Planeters that lounged around what was apparently a main meeting hall seemed to enjoy it, however.

Sternly, Renias told herself not to stare, despite the temptation. Instead she angled her head towards her feet and looked up through her fringe, curious to what a ‘standard’ Red looked like, assuming J and Yn were outliers. 

Quickly she realized that there was no standard. Three Reds sat around a sand-bath, twice as large as the one back at J’s compound, two of them half immersed in the sand, the other naked as the day he - or she, or it - was born. The exposed one was smaller than J, but built on a similar model - feathery hair, lean body, scales covering their bird-like legs. The other two were far larger, one taking up half the pool, burly arms stretched out behind, scars scratching across their skin proving them to be almost fully organic. The one beside them was closer to a Saldara build, but with a far wider chest housing a second set of clearly mechanical arms. All three had the same beak-like noses, but more mechanical than J’s - the largest with clear scars where the mechanical rebreather had been added later to the face.

“So is this your priest?” 

The little one skipped over, no one at all commenting about their lack of modesty. But now that Renais allowed herself a longer look, she realized that Red Planeters had no need for modesty on Earth standards. Their chests were flat, no nipples, and whatever member they had between their legs, something kept it tucked close to their body, making them look half neutered. No need to look away when there was nothing to hide, apparently.

“She’s not a priest.” J kept moving, and Renais followed along behind, even as the little one skipped around trying to get a good look.

“Hah!” The big one shouted, craning to look over their neck. “So says the Soldato!”

“You probably just want to keep her to yourself.” The other said, and all three burst into laughter, which J ignored.

“She’s wasted on you, Flyer.” said the big one.

“Exactly. You’re _boring_.” Complained the little one, whose quick darts were beginning to get on Renais’s nerves. “Priest-lady, you should come home with us! We’ll listen to all your stories!”

“She doesn’t talk.” J said, clear impatience in his voice.

“Oh, that’s okay!” The little one responded, reaching out to tug on Renais uniform, heedless of the way she ducked to avoid the hands. “We’ve got far more interesting problems to listen to! Problems enough for a whole church! Why just last week - “

“Not. A. Pirreast!” 

J froze, and turned. Renais crammed her hands over her mouth. Her words had been garbled, but the intonation and accent were exactly the same as that she had heard over and over from the Soldato’s mouth.

She didn’t know what she had said. Not really. The words made sense, but what these people meant by ‘priest’ eluded her. 

But it had an effect on the other Red Planeters. Something shifted, and the others laughed. “Fine, fine.” while the little one ducked their head in apology. “Sorry, Protector. No more jokes, promise.” 

“Good.” J said, and the little one scurried back to the bath, while he waved open a door almost exactly like the [commissary] door back at the compound. 

The last Renais heard of the three, before the heavy door closed behind her, was a bellowing voice shouting “Aeli! Caius! Porci! Break’s almost up! You’re moving the - ”

\------------------------- 

The shop was nothing like the storage area back at the compound, though it had been built on roughly the same lines. Bigger, of course. The seats were gone, replaced with shelves of common devices even Renais recognized. Sand for the baths. Light crystals. Fiddly connectors of the sort that would inevitably be eaten by cleaning bots, needing to be replaced. All things so common, apparently, that the proprietor didn’t care if someone walked away without signing for it.

Huge one-way windows looked out on the courtyard, and behind the counter were dozens of more specialized items, few of which Renais recognized, some of which had their own protective force-fields. The clerk was nowhere to be seen, but Renais could hear a strong heartbeat from the cluttered rooms behind the counter, along with a half dozen faster heartbeats from other rooms. J rapped on the counter with his knuckles and then leaned on it, obviously expecting to wait for a bit. Renais relaxed and allowed herself to snoop more.

_Why are you here?_

The voice echoed in her mind. Perfect French, menace hissing from every word, no obvious source. The female cyborg yelped, her hand falling to the knife at her side, eyes darting to find who had spoken.

Only to feel J’s hand land on her shoulder.

“It’s just a sphinx. Don’t worry.”

And he nodded to the top of a row of shelves. Two luminescent eyes - the same color of the sky in the courtyard - looked down at them.

_Why are you **here**?_

The question repeated, still dripping with menace, and the creature came into view. And Renais got her first look at an animal from the Trinary system.

It was small, about the size of a house cat, and built on the same lines - four legs, one head, long tail. But everything about it was _wrong_ in a way that spoke directly to the instincts, rather than the mind. It had feathers rather than fur covering its whole body. There were full wings on its front legs, which it used to glide down to the counter, where it then proceeded stare, fixed, at the two. It walked like a bird, rather than a mammal, and its tail did not so much lash as flare, like a parrot’s crest. 

All that Renais could have become used to. A cat, built out of bird parts. But the _face_.

No bird or cat had a face like that. It was flat, no muzzle or beak, eyes placed just a little too far apart but faced forwards. The mouth and jaw were distressingly human, the nose flat with slits for nostrils, on an already oddly blank face. No brows, but a high forehead shaded by the mane and with feathery ears further back. A human face in miniature, looking out of a lion’s mane, built from a bird.

_**Why are you here?** _

It repeated, looking straight at her with its blank turquoise eyes, a growl beginning to rumble in its throat.

She shivered.

“It’s not intelligent. It picked the question from your mind. Simply believe your answer, and it’ll leave you alone.” J said, dismissively, as if he wasn’t describing an apparently psychic animal as if it was as normal as a friend’s irritating dog.

Still, she tried. Her brows knit together and she thought at the creature.

_I’m needed._

The growl continued.

“You have to believe it.” J reminded her.

_I’m **needed.**_

That seemed enough. As fickle as a house cat, the moment she answered with force the creature went back to preening, its eyes losing the turquoise glow and instead showing a normal cat’s eye...assuming the slited irises were turned on their side. Renas shivered again.

“You like my Jainie?” 

The proprietor walked from the back, boxes carried in his hands. He had the same general form as a Saldara: wide hips, heavy muscles, with a broad face framed by a feathery mane almost identical to his pet. Of course he had the signature Red forelock and beak nose, and scars crisscrossing his hands with weathered lines etched into his face. The instant the door open, the sphinx snapped its head towards the intruder, eyes going turquoise, and letting out a tone that sounded half meow, half chirp.

“I don’t know why the Soldato is here, Jainie. But I’m sure the Priest likes you.”

Apparently that satisfied whatever question the sphinx had asked, and it closed its odd eyes and lay back down on the counter, apparently judging all involved no longer worth its time.

“She’s not a priest and she doesn’t talk.” J said. The sphinx’s ears twitched, and a look of irritation passed over its face.

The proprietor looked unconvinced, but went back to loading cubes on the counter. “If you say so. Livi said she was helping with the farm, so you needed more supplies. I presume that’s why you’ve come to bother me as well?”

“Yn said her components would work better with occasional meals.”

“Is that why you’ve started pulling water rations out of the tanks?” The man smiled, but it was far from genuine.

“Surely a cup of water every two days…”

“There may be some perks of living on the surface, but that water could do far better split half a dozen ways in the cities.” He indicated a readout on the counter. “And Yn requested I begin to send you regular supplies. For a spin and a half you’ve needed nothing, and now you want special treatment?”

Beneath his helm, J’s eyes narrowed and he leaned a hand on the table.

“I merely ask for my due. It is not my business what you’ve done with my allocation in the past, but I need it now. If it will increase my companion’s efficiency, I am sure it will more than make up for your dip in resources.”

“You say that, but Yn’s prescribed some rare foodstuffs. Things that will take months to order out here.” The man made a show of looking Renais up and down, but she held her ground even after his next question. “What makes her worth all that extra effort?”

“She is here. She is working. She has earned equal treatment according to our laws.”

“No one else gets that.” The sphinx’s tail twitched, and it glanced at the man, slight distress on its face, which only grew as he continued to insist, “I simply can’t spend the resources to send supplies all the way out to your base. The energy alone would - “

“Liar.”

He stopped, and turned to look at Renais, irritation on his face.

“I thought you said she couldn’t talk?”

J shrugged, but he also seemed a bit surprised. “She has her moments. Back to - “

“...the power, yes. It’s simply too much to - “

The sphinx’s ears went back, and Renais repeated, “Liar.”

The man sputtered, irritation growing. “Now girl, that’s a strong word to throw around. You’d best leave the talking to your Soldato if you don’t want - “

“Liar.” But this time she pointed to the sphinx, whose ears were back and teeth pulled into a grimace while its feathers had begun to stand on end.

“Oh.” J said. “I _see_.”

The proprietor quickly grabbed at the beast, only to earn a swipe from its human-like hands, before finally shoving it beneath the table. But his face had paled at J’s smirk.

“Your pet seems to have taken issue with your words, Vitus. Are you sure you wish to stand by them?”

Vitus’s eyes narrowed, and he spoke through gritted teeth. “Fine. You’ll get your supplies. But you better keep the channels cleared. I won’t be blamed for your own stupidity.”

“Evening, every tenth day, then. That should not unduly tax your schedule.”

“Fine. It’ll break my orders for - “

There was a growl from beneath the table, and Renais hid a grin as she repeated: 

“Liar.”

“Argh! Get her out of here!”

J was chuckling as they left, and it was easy to see why. Vitus had loaded them down with boxes of everything Yn had requested, and more, just to see the last of them.

\-------------------- 

The little Red - Porci - was waiting as they left, and their eyes widened hugely when they saw the boxes.

They whistled. “Wow! I’ve never seen anyone get that much out of Vitus at once. You must be some kind of lucky charm, Protector-Lady.”

“She suggested watching the sphinx.”

“...to see when he’s lying? Oh! That’s _clever_. Can I tell the others about it?”

J nodded, and Porci’s grin widened. “Thanks! Vitus’s always crying about Caius’s medicine. I know it’s his job and all, but…”

“He should not withhold from those truly in need.”

“Right. Oh! We’ve loaded up all your stuff. Probably best that we did that before you pissed off Livi’s partner.”

“I am sure the increase in efficiency my partner brings will calm his temper.”

“You _say_ that.” Porci rolled their eyes, a human gesture on an alien face. “Anything else you need?”

J shook his head, and Porci showed them to an elevator, a huge empty box that was clearly used more for freight than people. It rumbled to life the instant Porci stepped through the triangle door, and rumbled more as they waved a hand and set it into motion. Then they turned and smiled at Renais.

“If those two give you any problems about stuff you need, send the request on to our compound, and we’ll ask for it. We’ve got our own hydroponics setup so we usually have some extra space in our ration allotment.” They chuckled, a bright, cackling sound that reminded Renais of blue-jays. “Livi hates that we take use so much of the water we produce but Vitus loves when we use fewer rations, so it works out.” They nudged Renais lightly with a hip. “We farmers have to stick together, right?”

When Renais nodded they beamed, and waved a hand to open the doors. Quickly Renais shoved her helmet back on her head and braced herself for the sudden return of the ever-present winds. 

Neither Porci or J flinched when the doors opened to the plateau, though Renais found herself sliding on the smooth surface of the elevator floor. The sky had turned a dark cinnabar as the planet turned away from its three suns and now most of the light came from mushroom-like lamps lying close to the ground. Renais had not noticed them when they’d arrived in the morning. In the daylight they must have looked just like normal rocks, but in the night they raised up and revealed bright green interiors, giving workers just enough light to travel by, though little more. The paths glowed with a similar light, and Renais wondered how J had known where to land his vehicle without the helpful glowing lines.

Just as she’d expected, when they arrived back at the boat the back had been expanded to five times its original size, enough to hold the long planks of metal they would need to repair the worst damaged of the arrays. Everything was held fast with other boxes and a light forcefield, and the whole thing floated behind the still-moored boat.

“Are you taking the long way back?” Porci shouted over the winds.

Renais clearly heard the response through her helm, but she doubted Porci heard the sneering “That is none of your business.” The little Red responded with a laugh either way. 

“Alright. I’ll help you cast off.” They gallantly offered their hand to help Renais into the boat, something she did not need but accepted anyways - partially out of politeness, but mostly out of the still novel fact that she could touch these Reds, and they didn’t burn at all. She hadn’t really believed it until Porci, despite the easy way even they handled the broiling temperatures of the surface, but the little Red squeezed her hand once before letting go, content to open themselves up to more heat, rather than flinch backwards at the merest contact. No human would ever be able to do the same. 

As J started up the craft and Porci tugged the trailer into the right direction, Renais thought about that. ‘Touch-starved’ Yn had said. Maybe she was right. But Renais resolved to make sure that such a thing never held her back or impacted her plans for revenge.


End file.
